The word “influencer” has developed a bit of a bad reputation. We are all getting tired of images of perfectly staged food and beautiful people having fabulous meals. Everything is delicious, every new restaurant is amazing and every experience is the best ever. One starts to wonder if there is any bad restaurant in the whole state of Utah until one goes out to have an actual dinner.

Jennifer Burns does not particularly like being called a food influencer.

“Content creator, you mean?” she laughs

Burns has a point. Her work did not start with Instagram. About 11 years ago she produced and hosted Cooking Delight, a half-hour television show that aired on KJZZ every weekend. “It was a party in the kitchen, very high energy, and we had a live studio audience,” she described it. Burns cooked with celebrity guests, and each show ended with a musical guest. She produced about 36 episodes. On the same day she sold the show, her cookbook was published, containing 100 original recipes, 40 pieces of original art and a CD in the back. “So it was a good day that day,” she said.

Food was actually Burns’ second career. Her background was in sports marketing in Los Angeles. After she sold the assets of her company, she and her husband were no longer tied to LA and moved to Utah. Burns quickly discovered that doing nothing was not going to work for her. “I’m not a girl that can just sit around,” she said. “I need to create. I need to do things. I need to cook and I need to put it out there because I want to encourage people that cooking and dining in all these different restaurants is fun.”

Cooking became her creative outlet, mostly because her talents apparently did not extend to other forms of art. “I cannot draw a stick man to save my life,” she admitted.

Over the years Burns continued doing on-air television segments representing different companies and brands. She eventually opened a public social media account with a handle @jbcookinghost and people who knew her from television started communicating with her directly. “I love that recipe that you made,” they would tell her, or, “Thank you so much for showing us that this new restaurant opened up and we went.”

That communication with viewers developed into what Burns calls a “loyal local following,” interested in new restaurants, recipes and things to do. She built the account organically and still manages it herself. “I don’t have anybody helping me,” she said. “I have a really high engagement rate, so it takes me a really long time to go back and forth and engage with everybody that’s commenting on my post.” Instead of complaining about all the time this takes, Burns seems genuinely pleased by it. “I’m very thankful for it,” she added.

Somewhere along the way, however, something that Burns did because she loved food became a valuable marketing tool. Restaurants, resorts, events and food companies wanted access to her audience. They started inviting her to dinners and events and approaching her about paid partnerships. Burns now gets invited to restaurants constantly. “A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot,” she emphasized.

And this is where the murky world of influencer marketing begins.

If somebody gives you dinner for free, are you going to tell your followers that you did not like it? If a company pays you to promote its product, how likely are you to say that the product is terrible? More importantly, if everything an influencer posts is wonderful, why should anybody believe any of it?

Burns has a very simple approach.

“If it’s something I don’t like, I’m not putting it out there. That’s just the bottom line.”

She tries products before agreeing to work with food brands. If she is going to develop a recipe around something, she needs to know what it tastes like. If she doesn’t like the product, there is no partnership. “I won’t do any type of business with a brand” she doesn’t believe in, she said.

This does not mean Burns works only with small, carefully selected local companies. She has worked with national food brands, including Campbell’s. The product simply has to make sense for her. But there are some companies that she would not work with.

“McDonald’s doesn’t align with my brand and what I do,” Burns said.

Apparently, even a large marketing budget cannot make a Big Mac align with Jennifer Burns.

With restaurants, Burns does her homework and often tries the food before deciding whether she wants to become involved. She may share news of a new restaurant opening in an Instagram Story before she has eaten there, simply to let her followers know about it. But that is different from recommending the food. “It’s a step-by-step process for each company, each brand, each restaurant that you work with,” she said. She wants to be able to tell people that she loves the food and actually mean it, because her followers have an “inconvenient” habit of going to the places she recommends and then telling her what happened.

“I get DMs saying, ‘I didn’t have a good experience,’” Burns said.

That can happen even when Burns loves a restaurant. Restaurants have bad nights, employees don’t show up and food is not always perfectly consistent. But if she continually promoted food she didn’t like simply because somebody paid her, it would not take long for her audience to figure it out.

Interestingly, Burns is not interested in being a restaurant critic.

“I’m not a reviewer in any capacity,” she said. If she doesn’t like a restaurant, she does not post about it. “It’s the old saying, if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all.”

She has even stronger feelings about customers who have a bad meal, say nothing while they are sitting in the restaurant and then go home and write a one-star review.

“Don’t be a keyboard warrior,” Burns said.

A few years ago she wrote an article titled Be Kind: You Don’t Know What Restaurant Owners Are Going Through. It was written as restaurants were coming out of the pandemic, but Burns’ sympathy for restaurant owners remains. Staffing is difficult. Ingredients have to be available. The front and back of the house have to function together. Customers have to come through the door. A restaurant can do everything right for months and still have a bad night.

Burns has no illusions about how much fun it would be to deal with all of this editing and the pictures and writing the perfect caption and putting it out there the right way,” Burns said.

She is a self-described perfectionist. She photographs and films the food, edits the material, writes the caption and then spends more time communicating with people after the post is published. Burns believes that work has value, especially when her followers subsequently show up at the restaurant.

“It moves the needle,” she said.

This is perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings between restaurants and food influencers. A restaurant owner might look at the complimentary dinner as compensation. The content creator looks at the hours required to produce the content and the years spent building an audience.

Burns gets so many invitations that she has to say no to many of them. “Come and have a meal” sounds simple enough, but she points out that producing a polished feature afterward is work. If a restaurant expects that work, there needs to be an understanding about what is expected.

Mazza was different.

Burns was invited with several other local food writers and content creators to experience the longtime Salt Lake City Middle Eastern restaurant. Owner Ali Sabbah served a large selection of dishes and offered guests several Lebanese wines. Burns subsequently created a post about the restaurant.

But there was one problem with using Mazza as an example of a free meal influencing her opinion. Burns already loved the place.

“I was a regular. I love Mazza food. I love Ali,” she said. “He does an amazing job, and he’s so passionate about what he does and the way he creates his dishes. It comes from his heart. He grew up — this is his heritage.”

For Burns, creating a post after the event required no soul searching about whether she could honestly recommend the restaurant. “I was thrilled that I could make that and do a post for them and say that I love their food. That was already gonna be a given because I’ve eaten there so many times.”

The free meal is not why Burns created a full featured post on her own. She had been a fan and eating there long before anybody invited her to lunch.

And this may be the most important difference between Burns and the version of influencer culture that has given the word such a bad reputation. She does not pretend there is no money involved. She believes her work has value and wants to be paid when a restaurant or brand is asking for hours of professional content creation. She also accepts invitations, eats free meals and works with national companies. There is nothing mysterious about any of it.

But Burns also knows exactly what she is selling, and it is not a photograph of a plate of food. She is selling trust with access to people who have followed her for years and believe that when she says she likes something, she actually likes it.

*Featured image by Marc Reynolds