"I spent several hundred dollars on food-themed NFTs and here’s what I learned"
...a rare and collectable guest post.
This week’s edition of Expedite is a guest post from Barb Leung, a fellow newsletter writer, but also a restaurant industry professional and NFT collector.
It’s rare I cede this prized real estate to other writers, but I like to think I’m self-aware enough to step to the side when I know someone else can better explain a topic. Non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs, have been enjoying months in the spotlight connected to food and restaurant projects. Celebs have backed them, supporters have claimed they can save a beleaguered industry, and the uninitiated — and in some cases, the initiated, have wondered what they are and why we need them.
(In case you need a primer, I like this one from The Verge.)
I’ve been called an NFT skeptic, a label with which I disagree. But I am a pragmatist and I question projects that espouse things like community-building and real-life utility while maybe just creating unnecessary noise and friction. (For example, here’s Dan Frommer on Twitter this week, criticizing the coverage and potential implementation of NFTs for hotel reservations.)
Barb, on the other hand, has spent time and money investing in a handful of recent projects and speaks from experience. Here’s her take on some of the more popular food- and restaurant-centric NFT projects.
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I spent several hundred dollars on food-themed NFTs and here’s what I learned
by Barb Leung
From talks earlier this month of NFT sales slowing by as much as 92 percent from a September high to popular cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) — facing heavy selloff activity on exchanges as a byproduct of panic from recent collapse of $UST and $LUNA, perhaps it’s time that we address these food-themed NFTs head on.
I’ve spent the equivalent of a few hundred USD over the last few months in an attempt to acquire a fair understanding of what it is about these food-themed NFTs that may be attractive to some folks. Two of the big buzzwords that I’ve heard get tossed around in interviews about food in Web 3.0 are “community” and “utility”.
What’s quickly become a signifier for a potentially successful NFT project is its community prior to and post-minting. In terms of where you can find them, many NFT enthusiasts and project-backers can be found on Twitter and Discord because of the ease of access and discoverability. But it’s not as easy as throwing up a few posts; if you ever participated in forums or subreddits, you can attest to how much work it is to keep something like that alive.
As for utility, that’s been harder to implement. Some of the things that I’ve seen touted have included: giveaways for events (CHFTY Pizzas); access to private venues (Flyfish Club); recipes (CryptoCocktails); and license to use the NFT’s artwork for personal and commercial use (Bored Ape Yacht Club). But frankly, I haven’t seen a lot of this talk become a reality quite yet.
So let’s get to the three projects that I’ve inserted myself into: Shirley Chung’s Dumpling Mafia; Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelsohn’s CHFTY Pizzas; and Dominique Ansel’s Cronut Anniversary LTD Edition NFTs.
Dumpling Mafia
This past October, The Dumpling Mafia, founded by Chung and her friends, launched two NFT collections (and supporting Discord server and social channels) in partnership with digital currency machine company Coin Cloud. Designed by Los Angeles artist Narrator, the Dumpling Mafia Bosses collection features a total of 88 designs and the larger Dumpling Mafia collection showcases 888 styles.
But since Lunar New Year, the community has pretty much come to a rolling stop. The folks behind the project haven’t posted to the Discord server since early February and the last tweet went out in the beginning of March.
I don’t blame them in the least. They delivered on their promise of producing a virtual Lunar New Year event (shipping up to 50 Goldbelly kits for free), and still have their NFT auction to benefit AAPI LA live and waiting for someone to buy or make an offer. At the end of the day, keeping the momentum going while running an actual business (i.e. her restaurant) without onboarding a lot of new employees to help in the effort may have been too much, and something just has to give.
At least Chung and her team made a good run at it with the heavy press push and their unbridled and genuine enthusiasm for the artwork and ambitions for what the project could deliver.
CHFTY Pizzas
Thriving servers on Discord often boast the number of members and NFT holders, but they also do the actual work of keeping members interested. For example: ensuring safe spaces to chat, weekly check-ins via Twitter Spaces, interactive activities like contests and giveaways, or even going past digital with IRL meetups.
And you know what? I’ve been pleasantly surprised about how this project’s been turning out. Perhaps this is one of the few projects that I’ve seen thus far actively trying to implement utility (e.g. setting aside a certain amount of festival tickets for NFT holders to claim) and move into real life with local meetups. Of course, it helps when you have a much larger team than Chung’s to keep everything going while the figureheads attend to the day-to-day of their other business ventures.
But it’s not just about cultivating conversation that makes a community successful. The moderators have been constantly receptive to constructive criticism and feedback. Several weeks ago, CHFTY hosted a Kittch demo billed as a cooking class, with a few hiccups. However, comments — even critical ones — from participants were well-received and worked to provide a live course correction.
Dominique Ansel
Perhaps the most surprising collection was that of Dominique Ansel whose announcement of the NFTs, pegged to the anniversary of his wildly successful Cronut, was made only several days prior to the actual mint. The bakery promoted utility by way of a set of perks, which include: “a pass to skip the Cronut line, early access to new launches and events, and personalized greetings from Chef Ansel.” However, no roadmap was delivered and no press outlet seemed to bother digging into the question of “when?”
Where the bakery’s team has been clear in communication, though, is in posting Terms and Conditions. In contrast to Bored Ape Yacht Club, the DA team is quick to note that they retain the ownership over the NFT, name, and artwork.
Without any attempt at cultivating a community, the Supreme-like drop, and quickness to post legal protections (vs. outlining any roadmap on promised utility), I cannot help but feel that this collection embodies the purely transactional quality that many critics voice against.
Apart from two obligatory posts (1, 2) about the mint—on the day of—on Instagram, there hasn’t been any communication, or an easy-to-find one at least (as there is no Discord or group of any sort set up), to NFT holders. Perhaps most confounding is not the missed marketing opportunity for secondary market sales, but rather that us holders have seemingly been cast aside post-mint. There’s no mention of the associated NFTs on promotional posts that celebrate the special anniversary flavors in spite of the fact that the NFT collection features artwork of those exact flavors.
This isn’t necessarily a post about right vs. wrong. Frankly, I don’t think every NFT needs to have utility, and I agree for the most part that NFTs won’t save the restaurant industry. But shouldn’t we at least be making an actual go of it? It’s fine to experiment — especially when you’re one of the first to launch and attempt implementing utility — perhaps to later concede that maybe it wasn’t a sustainable endeavor. Otherwise, to create these projects fueled by our fandom and emotional ties to food, without any consideration of hospitality to their backers, runs counter to the industry as a whole.
Barb likes to call herself the Patron Saint of Dumplings at Nom Wah, heading all operations and marketing. She writes in her newsletter periodically about whatever she feels like, but somewhere along the lines of food and hospitality, and randomly, sometimes immigration.
