Sanjyot Keer is the founder of Your Food Lab, food content creator and influencer. He is a household name for recipes and his mouth-watering food videos are the rage. He envisions growing as a content creator in digital food space. He recently joined NewsX for an exclusive conversation as part of NewsX Influencer A-List series. In the exclusive conversation, he spoke to us about how his childhood passion for food grew into his profession, standards of food industry, processes involved and scope of revenue generation in digital content creation, and much more.
Talking about his childhood passion for cooking, he said “Yes, cooking has always been a happy thing for me as a kid and I started cooking from a very young age. I looked at street food vendors and wanted to replicate those recipes at home. So that’s how my childhood was. This passion grew in me and I took up cooking professionally. Initially I never wanted to be on screen but then an early career opportunity was to be a food producer for Masterchef India season 4. That’s where I got to know how a food show is curated. It was pretty glamorous and I got interested in becoming a food content producer.”
When asked about why he chose digital content creation over television media, he responded “this was really early in my career. After being around 8-9 months on that show, it struck me that I could do this at my home as I am tech friendly. That’s how I decided that I want to create for myself. I did not have the resources to do it initially. I started off with renting out camera, making DIY lights at home and shooting on my dining table. It was a humble beginning but people loved the content and I got really access to good viewership. I grew about lakh followers in just a month time. I realized that digital medium could work for me in longer run. Hence, started investing a lot of time and efforts into digital content creation.”
Speaking about the high standards of food industry, he shared “I have always been fan of Chef Sanjeev Kapoor and chef Harpal and watching these superstars on T.V was something I couldn’t even think to be there. I feel food content creation is an art which now everyone can display on internet. Through internet as a medium it has become so easy for someone like me to start producing content, put it out and prove to world that I can do this. I feel so happy when I get compliments from chefs like Harpal and Shokhi. Food is a big market for content consumption in India and globally. It is an open playground for everybody and a lot of people are trying their hands on content creation.”
Explaining about his team and the process that goes into digital content creation and well produced videos, he expressed “the biggest difference between a TV show and content created by creators like me is that it never starts with best production quality. In the initial days it was with very basic resources. As soon as I started churning out revenue out of my videos, that’s when I started reinventing into creation. For content creator everything is in house. We started with 2 members in 2016 and now we are a team of 5 talented people creating best digital food content.”
He concluded by sharing about revenue generation from his profession, he told “when I started out as a creator, everybody asked me how you are going to earn. To be really frank, I had no clue about it. Initial task was to create audience for myself and next step was to generate revenue. It took me almost about a year to generate revenue after I started producing content. My first revenue was from endorsing a brand on my platform. That’s how it started but later on other revenue streams too opened up. You are never comfortable with what you are doing right now and you always want to grow. My vision is to hire more people, build a really large team, and grow as a content food creator into the digital food space.”
