We’re going west.

This fall, Branding & Buzzing is heading to Alberta to create content, work with some of our current clients and, just as importantly, meet more of the people who make Alberta’s food scene what it is.

Chefs. Creators. Influencers. Food brands. Producers. Restaurants. People doing interesting things.

We want to meet you.

Branding & Buzzing is based in Ontario, but we’ve always been a national agency. Long before Zoom meetings became normal and you could produce a campaign with people you’d never actually met, we were getting on planes and going to where the stories were.

And some of our best work — and relationships — came from doing exactly that.

Coast to Coast

Before the pandemic, we worked with McCormick and Club House for Chefs on a national program called Coast to Coast.

The idea was pretty simple: get out of the office and go meet Canadian chefs where they actually worked.

Over the course of the program, we travelled to cities and culinary communities across the country, including Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Kelowna, St. John’s and our own backyard in Prince Edward County.

We hired chefs in each market to create recipes. We photographed their food. We visited their restaurants. We interviewed them and told their stories.

And one of us — Sean, Marian, or sometimes both — got on the plane with a member of our team and went there.

That last part mattered.

We could have hired somebody locally, sent over a brief and waited for the photos to come back.

But we would have missed half the point.

Travelling across Canada gave us a chance to understand how different the food culture is from city to city. We sat in restaurants. We met chefs one-on-one. We talked to local content creators and influencers. We found out who people were following, where they were eating and what was happening in each market.

Some of those meetings turned into relationships that lasted long after the campaign was finished.

And our Canadian culinary network got a lot bigger.

So, we’re doing it again.

A lot has changed since Coast to Coast.

Instagram has changed. Influencer marketing has changed. Content production has definitely changed.

But we still believe one thing: you build better relationships in real life.

So this fall, we’re spending time in Alberta.

We’ll be creating West Coast content for current clients, producing photo and video, working with local talent and continuing to build our network of Alberta creators, chefs, food people and brands.

Yes, we have databases.

Yes, we have creator platforms.

Yes, we can find somebody on Instagram in about 30 seconds.

That’s not the same as knowing them.

We want to know who is making great content in Calgary and Edmonton. We want to know the chefs people are talking about. We want to meet Alberta food companies that are growing. We want to understand what works there instead of assuming what works in Ontario automatically translates.

And we want our clients to benefit from those relationships.

Alberta brands — let’s have a coffee.

We’re also using the trip as an opportunity to meet Alberta companies.

If you’re a food, beverage or hospitality brand looking for help with social media, content, creators, PR, paid media or experiential marketing, we’d love to talk.

Not necessarily in a boardroom.

Coffee works.

Breakfast works.

A brewery works too.

We’re interested in meeting established Alberta brands as well as national companies that want stronger Western Canadian content and connections.

Alberta creators, chefs and food people — we want to meet you too.

This isn’t only about finding new clients.

One of the biggest things we learned from Coast to Coast was the value of building relationships before you need them for a campaign.

So if you’re an Alberta-based food creator, influencer, chef, photographer, videographer, stylist or someone else working in the food and beverage world, introduce yourself.

We have clients that need content.

We have brands looking for creators.

And we have projects coming west.

More importantly, we want to build the kind of network where, when the right opportunity comes up, we already know who to call.

That’s how we did it the first time.

We’re going to do it again.

Alberta, we’re coming. Let’s meet.

If you’re a brand, chef, creator or food industry person in Alberta and think we should know each other, reach out to Branding & Buzzing or send us a DM. Tell us who you are, what you do and where in Alberta we can find you.