What happens when you combine memorable brand moments with two Michelin stars? You get the COO of Verve, Barry Muldowney, in conversation with chef Jordan Bailey. With food festivals Taste of Dublin and Taste of London just around the corner, we’re throwing back to our conversation with Jordan about culinary marketing, the power of food in brand experience and the meal that made him want to be a chef.
At Verve, we are always looking for the freshest ingredients in creating a brand experience with a lasting impact. In this case, it might quite literally be all about the ingredients. Barry suggests that investing more of an event’s budget in food is a significant yet sometimes overlooked way of making a brand experience emotionally stimulating and memorable. “There are hundreds and thousands of events happening every day, and pretty much all of them will have the same type of food or the same variety. When you bring it up to that next level, people do remember.”
Creating a brand experience is about building an atmosphere for the consumer that reflects the brand and its values. The connection between food and atmosphere is the reason behind Jordan becoming a two-star Michelin chef. “It’s one of my earliest memories. I put on a meal for my whole family, I think it was like 12 of us. And when I say meal – it was just soup from a tin! From that moment I knew that food was about more than just eating. When I was bringing the food in and I did a little menu and everything, I could see the kind of atmosphere and feeling it generated in the room. I knew it was about more than just putting food on a plate even way back then.”
Amongst competing in the esteemed Bocuse d’Or, working in some of the world’s finest Michelin starred restaurants and his restaurant Aimsir setting the record as the Michelin Guide’s fastest ever straight to two-star restaurant, Jordan has also created menus for brand experiences. For guests at Verve’s Range Rover House Ireland event, Jordan created a gourmet taste and mixology experience, the success of which Jordan attributes to “getting a deep understanding of the brand…it comes down to right at the start, creating the menu by looking at the experience that the client wants to offer and key touch points that we need to hit. And then being super creative around that to make sure it’s a memorable event.”
One piece of advice Jordan would give to event planners wanting to bring their event to the next level is “to recognise that food is a great means to showcase your product or whatever your brand is about.” Reflecting on events Jordan has attended himself, the chef has noticed that elevated food is “normally not very high up on the list” of priorities at many events, “which is disappointing because it reflects badly against the brand, even if [the brand] is unrelated to food. If you’re a brand that’s very prestigious or luxury and then you’re putting out not very good food, it doesn’t look good. It’s like having your staff [not] nicely dressed. You wouldn’t allow that to happen, so why do you allow it with food?”
Reworking how we use food to elevate a brand experience also means considering the environmental factors. Barry highlights how “we’ve been on a sustainability drive at Verve for the last 10 years and recently became a B Corp”, asking how Jordan sees “environmentally responsible food fitting into experiential events”. Jordan considers sustainability as becoming less of a challenge, but rather an expected standard in the kitchen: “it’s going to be seen as the norm moving forward. So if you haven’t started [being sustainable] already, you should probably start.”
Food can do more than feed, it can forge memories. At Verve, we use it to create standout brand experiences. If you’re planning an event and see food as a key ingredient in your brand experience, we would love to hear from you. Contact us at hello@verveliveagency.com.
