03 February,2022 04:16 PM IST | Mumbai | BrandMedia
Kashif Tanwar
At that time the blogging scene was completely different. In-fact, Kashif recalls the digital content was not all that powerful and people generally used to respect offline content more than the online. The Mumbai city had so many newspapers at that time and each newspaper had a dedicated food reviewer. They were the ones who used to get the invites and more often than not bloggers were not given the respect they deserved. However slowly things began to change and people started appreciating digital content creators as well.
In Kashif's case the beginning was not easy as he was a student at that time and couldn't afford the restaurant bills. Coming from a middle-class background meant that pocket money was very little. "Whatever small money I saved, I used to spend it on paying the restaurant bills so that I can create content for FB, Instagram and Zomato", says Kashif. As things progressed his posts on Instagram started receiving traction. His followers on Zomato also started growing. At that time, I used to contact the newly opened restaurants and email my profiles and request them to be invited. Initially I faced a lot of rejection, however when my Zomato account followers reached around 1000 and Instagram followers around 20 k, I started getting invites. And from then onwards there has been no looking back.
Meanwhile he also finished his civil engineering and joined a developer. Now as he was earning, he started using a large chunk of his income for food blogging. As his profile grew, Kashif whose instagram handle is foodie kashif decided to turn into a full-time blogger. He also completed a digital marketing course to hone his skills. However, he faced a lot of resistance at home when he informed his decision to leave the job and start full time blogging. But slowly everything got sorted.
His first big collaboration came when he was chosen as one of the few digital content creators for Nokia. The company had launched the Lumia phone and that was my first big collaboration, he remembers. Today he collaborates with some of the best food brands like Dominos, Burger King etc and has dined in some of the fanciest restaurants of the city. Now so many of my reels go viral. Recently I collaborated with Dominos Pizza and my reel got more than a million views.
Unlike others he also visits very small restaurants which no other food blogger with even one fifth of his followers would visit. I am trying to help small time restaurants by promoting them on my Instagram handle, he says. His instagram handle is foodiekashif.
https://instagram.com/foodiekashif
