Tastemade and Blavity Celebrate Black Cuisine With New Food Vertical

This fall, Tastemade and Blavity Inc. are bringing the Sauce, a new food vertical for young Black food lovers and beyond, to their online and social platforms.

In a strategic partnership, Tastemade and Blavity are co-developing and co-producing original sponsored content for the upcoming series. Programming will be dedicated to celebrating the Black experience as it relates to Black culture and cuisine.

From family recipes to holiday celebrations and dining design to food sustainability, Sauce aims to “elevate Black restaurants and creators, highlight the history of cuisine, feature recipes that carry on Black food traditions, and more,” according to a press release obtained by BLACK ENTERPRISE.

Tastemade, an Emmy Award-winning food- and travel-related network, claims it engages a global audience of more than 300 million monthly viewers with mouthwatering recipes, travel knowledge, and innovative home and design solutions. With this, Sauce will tap into Tastemade’s expertise in food content and influence.

“Tastemade has done an incredible job of telling stories that have impact across communities — that’s why 60% of our audience is multicultural, Al Hawes, Head of Partner Experience and Operations at Tastemade, told BLACK ENTERPRISE in an email statement. “Still, we understand there is an opportunity to do more.”

According to Hawes, this partnership with Blavity “gives Tastemade the ability and insight to tell even more authentic stories around food and the Black experience.”

Serving Black millennials and Gen-Z, Blavity is a news media and venture-funded technology company “committed to elevating the voices of Black creatives and helping to tell the story of the Black experience through an authentic voice,” Orchid Richardson, SVP Digital at Blavity Inc., told BLACK ENTERPRISE.

“Partnering with Tastemade creates an opportunity for Blavity to introduce those creative voices to new spaces and allows us to reach new audiences outside of our community,” said Richardson.

With a digital reach of over 100 million, Blavity claims to see 174% more time spent on food content all across its global network of platforms, including Travel Noire, where food is the third most popular topic.

“The Black American culinary experience is the foundation of most modern American cuisine,” Richardson said. “This partnership allows us to tell those stories and document our history. And in doing so, we have the opportunity to introduce the entire diaspora of the Black experience through food.”

Sauce is a solution to the unmet need for food content made by and for Black audiences. Tastemade and Blavity aim to address the disparity in representation to help Black creators in the food industry thrive.

“Many stories have been written about the lack of representation in food media and the consequences it has, whether intended or not,” Hawes said.

“It means that Black-owned restaurants don’t get the coverage they deserve and need to survive. It means that Black culinary talent doesn’t get the inspiration they seek because they don’t actually see themselves highlighted. And, it means that we are all deprived of true cultural understanding critical to our growth as a society.”