Zig Zagging to Food with Friends

Hi everyone,

Phil here, one of the co-founders of tastebase 👋🏼

It's been a long, windy road for us at tastebase as we've journeyed to find our voice as a brand. After over a year of working with numerous writers and trying to professionalize our brand voice via platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo, I said fuck it. I'll give it a shot myself.

Rather than trying to act and sound like a 'professional brand', we've decided to just be ourselves. The real, uncensored people behind the brand. As such, we're migrating to beehiiv with our new newsletter. Introducing Food with Friends. Here's what you can expect from our new Food with Friends newsletter:

1. An exploration on all things food, life, culture, and everything in between where we share perspectives and insights from friends within the food industry as well as friends from other fields too 🎨 📈 🎤

2. Topics that are top of mind for me as a builder. In all honesty, this newsletter will partly be my practice to explore different ideas through writing 💭

3. While we may have bits of news and trends, that won't be our main focus. Instead, our focus will be on sharing perspectives from creatives and builders through the initial lens of food 🧋

4. And of course, we'll be sharing interesting upcoming events, discounts and promos, and announcements 📢

Let me reintroduce myself 🙋🏻‍♂️

For those of you who are new, let me reintroduce myself and tastebase. Who I am and how we got here.

I'm Phil Chen. One of the creators of tastebase, a social tasting club. My journey with food started right after college as a barista at Philz' Coffee (the same Philz Coffee featured in HBO's Silicon Valley) where I fell in love with coffee and learned to appreciate the world of food and beverage both as an expression of creativity and as a business. I guess you could say coffee was my gateway drink into the F&B industry 😂

Fast forward nearly a decade (after trying my hand at acting, spending time within the world of tech startups, and working in finance). COVID hits. The world shuts down. NBA games stop. Restaurants close. Grocery lines wrap around for countless blocks. How was I to explore my passion for food and beverage with the world closed? Thank god for Instagram and Zoom. With retail stores closed, Instagram became my main way to discover new brands. Zoom became my virtual space to try new products together with friends. Food truly became a saving grace for me by bringing people together during a scary time when we couldn't physically gather in person.

As we tasted dozens of brands' products, we quickly realized the gap between what we were seeing on Instagram (the aesthetic and branding) vs. what we were tasting in front of us (the products' actual taste). After tasting one too many products that didn't sit well with my taste buds, I personally grew frustrated from seeing these beautifully delicious looking products only to realize that some of them actually tasted like sh*t 💀. If only I had known ahead of time, I could've saved myself a lot of money 💰 and heartache 💔.

Why were we being duped by marketing, when in reality we had no idea how the products actually tasted? It was as though we were watching a movie without first looking at its Rotten Tomato score or trying a new restaurant without first checking their Yelp or Google score. For anyone whose been disappointed by a restaurant or whose watched a bad movie, you know. It's a big leap of faith.

And with over 20,000 new food and beverage products launching each year, consumers were taking huge leaps of faith by basing their tasting decisions based on product packaging rather than taste. With this key insight, tastebase was born.

Sponsored Promo 🎁

Our friends at Joydays have a treat for you. To celebrate their launch, the Joydays team is offering the tastebase community 25% off your first Joydays purchase using code DELICIOUS25. Come be one of the FIRST to experience the joy of spike-free snacking!

Joydays is a next generation food company dedicated to making better-for-you, low glycemic snacks for the people who need them most! Joydays' cookies contain 5g of fiber, 10g net carbs, and only 3g of sugar per pack.

Be sure to rate Joydays on tastebase and tag them and us on social @getjoydays @tastingwithtastebase

Join our tastebase community on Circle ⭕️

Inside, you'll connect with fellow foodies, brand founders, and potential investors. You'll see exclusive discounts and promos, announcements for upcoming events, and more! There'll even be an exclusive founders only channel to help fellow founders connect and collab. See you inside!

Welp, that's a wrap for our 1st edition of Food with Friends!

ps - if you liked this, please drop me a note and share with a friend :) I'd love to hear from you who you'd like to see featured in future newsletters.