If you’re desperate to find out the recipe of an Asian dish, we have a very fun, very complicated, very digital way to do it.
CT Food, a Swedish food supplier (yes you heard that right, Swedish) is running a clever Instagram campaign for foodies who enjoy Southeast Asian flavor. Where’s the relationship? CT Food is a Scandinavian company that happens to specialize in importing and distributing Southeast Asian cuisine.
The concept behind this is rather simple. Photograph your meal and upload it to Instagram. You should probably keep the dark filters at bay here if you want a reliable result. Tag the photo with @askctfood or #askctfood, and that’s it. A team of food specialists will get back to you with a list of every (or most) ingredients you’ll need to make it yourself.
If it’s the mysterious Asian ingredient that has you stumped, CT Foods’ team will get on the case. “If you have a weird ingredient that you’ve never seen before, you can take a picture and ask us what you want to know about it. We have between six to seven experts who will reply to your question, giving ingredients or recipes,” creator of the concept Lu Long told Humans Invent.
As a bonus, CT Foods has a “database” of the top 500 ingredients used in Southeast Asian dishes, and some of these may be listed with a unique hashtag in CT Foods’ reply. So in case you’re stumped about a listed ingredient, you can simply tap the hashtag and find out more about it.
Here’s where it gets a bit complicated: All replies from CT Foods come in Swedish … and all queries you send them have to be written in the language as well. If you have a Scandinavian friend who speaks Swedish, then great. If not then Google Translate works, too.
The food service industry is trying to navigate Instagram and all the food porn photographers making use of it, and you have to give CT Foods credit for coming up with a creative and rather useful campaign. Safe to say, few businesses out there have been quick to embrace these visual marketing channels creatively. While Instagram approach probably isn’t the quickest way to backward engineer Asian cuisine (especially considering some of the language barriers), it’s certainly an engaging concept to appeal to the Instagram foodies out there (of which we are, there are a few).
