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Marion Grasby’s delicious marketing lessons to running a creator-led media company
Marion Grasby wears a lot of hats, and the toque blanche is only one of them. Mumbrella's Darcy Song sat down with Grasby and her partnerships manager, Andrew Hinshelwood, to chat about the metamorphosis of Marion's Kitchen from a food company to an omnipresent media entity.
Marion Grasby wears a lot of hats, but some have, perhaps unintentionally, grown bigger than others.
From a crowd favourite among MasterChef contestants whose elimination sparked somewhat of a cultural tumult, to a beloved Australian food creator whose channel growth became YouTube and Facebook’s favourite case study, Grasby had her fair share of audience attention in the limelight.
However, there’s an equal, if not greater amount of business effort happening behind the great frontwoman. With close to 30 staff across its Noosa creative studio, Melbourne partnership base and Bangkok administration office, Marion’s Kitchen is shaping itself into an omnipresent food media entity that quotes a 30 million monthly reach across a portfolio of owned channels.
How did everything begin? Grasby says being on the right platform, at the right time, certainly helped.
Grasby’s dive into content creation is almost accidental. At least, becoming a social media superstar was not what she set out to do when she first started making videos about ten years ago. With her husband and business partner, Tim Althaus, Grasby reversed-engineered the typical process of establishing a creator-led product line.
“We started very much as a food company,” she says. “We decided to do some marketing, and that was when Facebook and Instagram really had started becoming a place where people were living and breathing.”
“That was the place to be particularly for smaller, family-owned companies like ourselves, whereas a big TV campaign, for example, ten years ago is not really feasible for us.”
Grasby
She says for a business like Marion’s Kitchen back then, social media “democratised” a lot of things. For anyone committed to making relevant, entertaining content and not fixated on only sales figures, communities and brands who foster that will buy into their works.
Nevertheless, Grasby acknowledges that social platforms have changed, and food and beverage is an incredibly crowded space right now. When asked about what Marion’s Kitchen’s point of differentiation is, she laughs and says, “it’s a question I asked myself all the time.”
“You know, it might sound really cliché, but I think there’s a real art to being able to talk to a camera like it’s your friend … I think that, hopefully, is why people keep coming back,” she adds.
“I also think we were very, very particular about how good the recipe is, I mean, you wouldn’t even know the amount of videos or recipes that we might make.”
“And if it doesn’t turn out perfect, or if I don’t think people are going to love it … I’m happy to throw away that investment.”
Grasby and her two self-published cookbooks
With the same kind of commitment and quality control, the operations of Marion’s Kitchen have morphed into something more complex in 2017. While a great chunk of the business is still food products – meal kits, curry paste, marinades – Grasby and her team took on the ambitious project of taking ownership of the entire production and distribution process.
Her recently self-published cookbook, Just as delicious, launched on Facebook Live and the pre-sale stock sold out before it even hit the warehouse. After bringing the process fully in-house, Grasby says there’s no turning back to the traditional way.
“I love working with my publisher, it was great, but the level of creative control over the last two books, and just the actual dollars for everyone is insane,” she says.
A good cookbook print run for a big chef might be around ten thousand, Grasby says, and they dished out that volume in four or five days.
“The creator economy is a real thing, and I think that a lot of people do get it, maybe a lot of people don’t, but being able to break down the original constructs of publishing or retail and go direct to the consumer in a meaningful way is incredible.”
While she loves the joy of being the whole package, Grasby says she should have invested in talents earlier in the business.
“It’s expensive to invest in people and, I think, it’s hard for businesses starting out to take the leap.”
Andrew Hinshelwood
However, when Marion’s Kitchen started seriously scaling up two years ago, Andrew Hinshelwood came on board as head of partnerships and gave brand relationships a nudge in the direction.
Outside of its own content, Marion’s Kitchen now works with brands including Panasonic and Fever-Tree, which according to Hinshelwood, are not your average “churn-and-burn clients”.
Panasonic has a natural linkage with Grasby’s cooking content which is the kitchen appliances, and Fever-Tree is behind a few travel and entertainment programs.
There are general product integrations such as cocktails recipes that are all so conveniently bubbly, but also educational content like a distillery trail YouTube series where she and the team visit independent spirit houses around Australia.
Although Grasby, as she said in the video, would never turn down an opportunity to day drink on the job. For viewers, Hinshelwood says the appeal is about “going along for the ride”.
“It’s people experiencing with Marion, and Marion is not the expert, that’s the point,” he says.
Other brands including Singapore Tourism have tapped into this audience sentiment, as well as an undisclosed travel partner whose content is currently being produced by Grasby’s Bangkok team.
“A lot of our content is cooking content, but it’s where food and lifestyle meet entertainment. Diversifying into new content opens up new opportunities, because everyone wants to see what Marion’s doing and goes along with it,” Hinshelwood says.
Speaking of what’s next for Marion’s Kitchen, Hinshelwood says there is always a lot going on. The core energy will always be geared towards channel growth and audience engagement, which eventually will enable the business to “control and grow our own destiny”.
Product-wise, Grasby’s new homeware brand was launched in November with a product close to her heart – a wok, signalling a further expansion into different verticals around her influence.
However, for Hinshelwood, an area to look into in 2023 is giving back to the bigger creator community with creative partnerships.
He teases that Marion’s Kitchen is working with global creators to leverage its infrastructures and help them on the publishing side, with details coming in the new year. But in the long-term, the goal is to get more talents into the cast beyond Marion and put forward more faces to help people connect.
“We’re pretty ambitious in terms of our goals, Marion, Tim and I,” he says. “We want to keep growing, and I think we’ve got the platform to do it.”
“Exciting times, always learning.”
Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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