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.

---

I spent several hundred dollars on food-themed NFTs and here’s what I learned

by Barb Leung

A CHFTY NFT, courtesy of 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