YumCrunch CEO Mike Duffy Talks Reimagining Food Media at Streaming Media 2025
YumCrunch CEO Mike Duffy speaks with Streaming Media contributing editor Timothy Fore-Siglin at Streaming Media 2025 about YumCrunch’s “food content that connects” approach. He shares the company’s different types of partnerships and content and explains how he incorporates ideas from short-form content creation and social media into a broad range of food-related content across multiple platforms.
‘Food at the Heart of It’
Fore-Siglin asks Duffy to describe what YumCrunch is. Duffy says its “mission is to reimagine food media. We focus on food content across all available distribution channels. I like to say that we’re an entertainment company masquerading as a marketing agency.”
“Are we talking old school Julia Child, or are we talking food porn on some of the newer networks or Insta kinds of things?” Fore-Siglin asks.
“Everything you can imagine,” Duffy clarifies. YumCrunch has series on Netflix, Amazon, and Roku, he notes. Five years ago, he noticed that a change was happening in consumer behavior in that viewing was shifting to social video. He sought to understand how the younger generations were gravitating to it, and then the older generations also began to embrace it. Duffy provides some examples of what YumCrunch has accomplished: “I launched Emeril Lagasse’s personal YouTube channel for him. We’ve done all sorts of content for Pellegrino and Stanley Tucci, and we’re the agency of record for several food brands. We also are working with, for instance, the Kansas City Chiefs on a big series that’s launching this month that is a food-based tailgate content series that is distributed on their YouTube channels and short form across all of their social channels.”
Duffy adds, “I like to say that if it has food at the heart of it—whether it’s a stand-and-stir [program] like Julia Child, working with an Emeril or a food influencer like Owen Han, or it’s a food-centric series that is about discovery and travel or celebrating food in tailgates and things like that—if it’s got a morsel of food in it, it’s something that we love to tell stories around.”
Short-Form vs. Long-Form and the Content-Commerce Connection
Fore-Siglin notes that social video is short-form, while Netflix offers long-form content, so he wonders if the short-form versions are repurposed clips from the long-form, but Duffy says that’s not always the case. “The anatomy of a viral video is sort of hard to decipher, but whenever we make a piece of long-form content, we absolutely look at it to see what sort of waterfall of short-form assets can be pulled from it,” he explains. “So teasers, show opens, individual segments, those all work great. And especially if you’re in YouTube, you can pull those out, put them on YouTube Shorts, and then that can drive traffic to the long-form videos. But also we create short-form content specifically to reach that sort of social viewer who’s looking for something that feels like that piece is made independently and specifically for that 30 seconds to 90 seconds that they have to experience it.”
Building on this point, Fore-Siglin asks if there’s a call to action inviting viewers to check out the long-form content or buy specific merchandise. Duffy says yes. He believes a content-commerce connection is important. “We as media creators and as executives and professionals, we have to evolve. And one thing that many of us have never really thought about is, How do you monetize that content? What are the key metrics of success that justify the time that the consumer or the viewer is spending [with] that content, but also the people who are paying for it? What’s their ROI? So I look at every piece of content and I go, ‘What is the monetization structure around this? What are the key metrics that we need to be delivering?’” He provides the example of YumCrunch’s current client Melo, which offers a kava beverage. “They’ve hired us to help build brand awareness through really great authentic social content, short-form. But ultimately that’s going to migrate in terms of KPIs into, ‘How many cases of product are you selling for us?’”
Duffy notes that he’s “become a student of marketing, and the key metrics in marketing, as a way to really get my content funded.”
Engagement as Instant Feedback
Fore-Siglin pivots to metrics, saying that metadata has been a popular topic at the conference. “Looking at the information around the content itself, what do you see perceptibly that’s different between the generation that’s younger than us versus the generation say of our age that’s consuming this kind of content? Granted, we all talk about the short attention span piece, but in reality, is it completely different kinds of content that appeal to those two generations?”
“That’s a great question,” Duffy says. “The answer to that is kind of the holy grail of figuring out the black box of social video.” He thinks for a moment and adds, “So I would say this, that the main metric that we are focused on these days is engagement”—shares, comments, and likes.
Fore-Siglin reinforces the point. “Not just viewing, but actually actively doing?”
Duffy explains that viewing data “is a false positive oftentimes because you can put paid media behind something and you can sort of artificially manufacture view counts, but you can immediately look at the engagement and see that’s actually not being viewed.” He continues, “I’m a former standup comic. I come from live performance, and my background is in, ‘I gotta appeal to that audience.’”
“Instant feedback,” Fore-Siglin chimes in.
“Yeah. So social video gives us that immediate feedback that allows us to pivot and be more nimble as we sort of craft our program,” Duffy agrees.
The Next Big Thing?
Fore-Siglin notes that cat memes are always popular. “Is it videos of sushi or cupcakes that are evergreen on the food side, or is there something that universally appeals to everybody? Do we have a cat meme equivalent in the food world?”
“For sure. There’s a whole category of food porn out there,” Duffy begins to say, before he realizes he should use the term “food core” now. He doesn’t want to offend certain conservative clients. “Can’t really throw around the word ‘porn’ too much. They’re already afraid of Hollywood,” he says wryly. “So we call it food core.” He says the category of food content that performs best is baby back ribs.
Fore-Siglin and Duffy both find this amusing because it’s unexpected. Duffy shares: “So we said, ‘All right, well, every time we put a piece of content out there that features baby back ribs, it outperforms. So why don’t we create a series called Million Ways to Baby Back?’ So I literally have a series, I’ve done about 35 episodes—60-second episodes—with this influencer named Chuck Matto. He goes by @chucksflavortrain, and every single episode, he does a new recipe on baby back ribs. Well, several of them have gone viral, but one has blown up, and it is the corn dog baby back rib. We take a baby back rib, and we essentially deep fry it in corn dog batter, and then we do a little bit of remoulade on top of it. It’s unbelievable. People have freaked out over it. So we’re actually developing it now as a product that we can sell direct to consumer.”
Duffy notes that on social media, anything that’s different “really pops.” He continues, “People love pork, and then you add a layer of [being] different to it, and you have a shot at going viral.”
Fore-Siglin muses, “I can almost see, like, haggis funnel cakes or something like that.”
Duffy playfully jumps on this. “Oh, I like that. I’ll explore and see what we can do with haggis.”
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