Today we’d like to introduce you to Barrington Transou.
Hi Barrington, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I started The Food Tour my junior year in college in 2016 (I went to an HBCU, North Carolina Central Univ). One of my friends and I got tired of always eating in the cafe so we started to explore all the restaurant opportunities that surrounded the campus. When we started going to these restaurants, we would put them on our Snapchat (this is when Snapchat was the wave) and all of our friends would DM us like “where is this located?”, “this looks so gooood” blah blah blah … So, my friend and I came up with the idea of starting an Instagram of just posting the places we go to so people would stop DMing us about it… however, we wanted to be different from all the other IG food pages that already highly saturated the platform.
So, to make us different we would take people of influence with us to eat. We would invite professors, popular kids like football players and campus government officials like the President of our university, etc. We would get their reactions of the food and it gave a lot of publicity to not only us but the restaurant as well.
In only 3 months we gained like 3500 followers. Things were taking off but then the summer came and we ended up losing sight of our vision.
We rebooted the Food Tour my senior year last semester and this was when we first started making money off the platform. We sold merchandise such as wristbands and t-shirts. Restaurants started recognizing our brand where they would contact us to review their menus and such and everything was just all-around moving in a positive direction.
Fast forward, it’s now graduation and I had to make a decision. Do I want to take the risk and take The Food Tour serious and make this a legitimate business OR do I want to accept the job offer to move to Rhode Island and work for the Biggest Hospitality company in the world… I chose the hospitality company.
When I moved to RI of course The Food Tour fell again to the wayside and it kind of became a distant memory. I got promoted and the company moved me to Dallas. I got married and then Covid Struck. I literally got furloughed the day we got back from our Honeymoon. I was furloughed for 7 months. Within that time, I kept thinking about what The Food Tour could have been and how I may have missed a real opportunity to become something great.
Out of pure boredom, I ended up rewriting a whole business plan for how I would relaunch The Food Tour. I was ready to start and everything but the only thing I was missing was capital to begin. Oh yeah and also all the restaurants were shut down at the time.
I ended up getting rehired with the same company in September 2020, however this time I would get to work permanently remote!
In March 2021 I bought my first professional camera and I would do free photoshoots of mostly people for almost 3 months. I just really wanted to learn how to work the camera. By the end of July, I started to pivot my way to shooting solely food and I started implementing my business plan I wrote nearly a year ago into full effect. I bought lighting equipment new lenses and everything.
I knew if I wanted to relaunch It would be very difficult because I literally haven’t logged on to my Food Tour Account For almost 3 years. And with the new IG Algorithms, I knew I would be Shadowbanned. To add to that I’m also in a new city with no follower in Dallas. All of my followers were in NC. So, none of my new content would cater to my already existing audience.
To overcome that I reached out to a lot of influencers in Dallas and used them as a marketing technique to get more Dallas Followers. I would take them out to eat, interview them, and we would get a photo of the influencer biting / interacting with the food from the restaurant we went to… this strategy worked VERY well. We gained nearly 200 followers in the first 2 months of relaunch (We relaunched in August).
When we featured @dubbsgrubbs on our page in September everything literally changed for The Food Tour. We had nearly 5 restaurants just that week reach out to hire us for photoshoots of their menu.
We’ve been at this for just under 2.5 months and the love and response from our new Dallas fanbase has literally been amazing. I even have people volunteering to help The Food Tour grow to the next level by offering to become BTS photographers, website designers, and Creative Directors. My friend Robert Moore has really helped me a lot with this process and I honestly love how much people, in general, are believing in the vision… this has definitely been a team effort.
We just started a series called:
“I’m not a Chef”
Where me and my wife review different recipes, we find online and that’s been taking off as well!
There is so much more growth for TFT and it’s honestly just overwhelming to see that all this has happened in the span of a little under 3 months. Nevertheless, this idea has been years in the making I’m just excited to see the vision finally come true.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Biggest struggle would be just staying motivated. Sometime it gets hard to keep a creative mindset when your work isn’t getting the true love you believe it deserves… when you put like 5-6 hours into an edit and the post only gets like 30 likes or 600 views it just makes you think, “what’s the point? “I always have to think long-term goals with this business because becoming a household name doesn’t come overnight it definitely takes consistency, hard work, and dedication.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m an up-and-coming Food Photographer. I am currently learning the ropes of what it takes to be great. I literally watch hours of YouTube tutorials on my craft so I can be better than I was the week before. As of now, I would say I love to capture action photos. It’s something about capturing a moment in time that most people don’t even know they’re experiencing until they see your photo. I love taking portraits of people enjoying their food. I love capturing moments of Chefs actually creating their masterpieces. When people look at my photos, I want them to feel like they are actually in the moment with me as I take the shot… that’s the art I’m trying to perfect, that’s the art I want to be known for.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I come from a small city in NC called Winston Salem, so Dallas is very different from what I’m used to. I love how many creatives there are in the city. There are not too many big named creatives where I’m from. But to be living and shooting in the same city as a @DamonEats and @Dubbsgrubbs it’s a very humbling experience. Back in my college days, we use to get excited to interview people with over 10k followers because that was like a big deal for the city, we were in. However, in Dallas, I’ve eaten with influencers with up to 500k followers with huge loyal fan bases! So, all in all, I love the opportunity here.
Negatives: Dallas sometimes feels like a popularity contest. A lot of these big named people out here don’t want to see the next man succeed so sometimes they hoard knowledge that could be helpful for someone starting like myself. In the small town that I’m from, it’s nothing like that. It’s such a small group of creatives there where we kind of have to stick together and help each other out… here everyone is competing.
Pricing:
- 150/hr to the end of the Year for Restaurant Menu Shoots
Contact Info:
- Email: Therealfoodtour@gmail.com
- Instagram: Therealfoodtour
- Twitter: Therealfoodtour
- Youtube: Therealfoodtour
Image Credits:
Maxresphotos
