Twisted’s mission is to remind the world that cooking and eating should be fun. We firmly believe that we should throw the rule book out the window when it comes to cooking, and we heartily encourage people to experiment with recipes to build their confidence in the kitchen.
Initially renowned for our incredibly popular ‘hands in bowls’ recipe videos featuring unique twists on classic recipes, we’ve since expanded our repertoire with a full slate of personality-led series.
This year in particular, as a reaction to the global pandemic, we introduced a number of new, personality-led original series designed to keep our audience informed and entertained by providing practical and purse-friendly recipes to help them stay inspired in the kitchen whilst food shortages were increasingly common. Through these newly launched series, we aimed to support our audience with relevant and responsible content at a time when they needed it most.
With lockdown sending our teams home and without access to our studios, we thought that our content would be negatively impacted. Instead, the Twisted team reacted with incredible agility, setting up home studios to continue creating relevant content for our audience at a time when they were looking to social, not only for information and entertainment but for connection.
For several months, we planned, filmed and edited videos entirely remotely with the chefs, videographers and editors all living in places with some form of lockdown restrictions. Our videographers worked closely with our chefs to guide them in filming, advising on camera and lighting set up and directing the shoots remotely.
We launched numerous new, original series in direct response to the pandemic. ‘Corner Shop Challenge’ saw the Twisted chefs challenge themselves to create Twisted-level meals with few and inexpensive supplies, creating flavourful dishes for under £5. For ‘What’s In Your Fridge?’ we asked Twisted’s five million Instagram followers to share photos of what they have in their fridge each week, with the chefs creating bespoke recipes with the most common ingredients submitted.
To help our audience be more economical with what they were cooking while keeping mealtimes interesting and delicious, we launched ‘Shelf Life’, featuring recipes centred around ingredients that have a long shelf life. Inspired by the rapidly growing trend for home baking during lockdown, we launched ‘Bake In’ to inspire bakers of all experience levels - from first-timers to people looking for tips to perfect their baked goods..
Our ‘Food Palace’ series saw one of our chefs create funky food mash-ups from his home in Crystal Palace in south London, and looking beyond our in-house talent, we introduced the series ‘Chefs Making Snacks’, inviting guest chefs to showcase their skills by creating a snack of their choice (with a twist, of course).
The new series were published across our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube channels. In addition to the new original series, we created bespoke 30 second recipe videos filmed entirely from our chef’s phones for TikTok, published behind the scenes footage on Instagram’s Reels and hosted live streams led by the Twisted chefs on Facebook and Instagram.
Rather than attempting to hide the changes to production, a central theme across all of our newly launched series was to acknowledge the global situation and let our audience know that we were facing this adversity together. This approach resulted in more authentic, relatable content and more meaningful connection with our audience.
The success of our personality-driven content and the new series launched during lockdown has led us to generate over 2 billion video views across social platforms since March.
Our audience has been overwhelmingly receptive to our new content formats. Across 13 episodes our ‘Bake In’ series we generated over 13M million views and 350K engagements, and our ‘Corner Shop Challenge’ series has amassed over 16M million views and 300K engagements.
The launch of our remotely produced series has led to 65% and 17% follower growth on YouTube (1.7M subscribers) and Instagram (5.1M followers) respectively, year-on-year. As well as 228% and 489% year-on-year follower growth on our Snapchat (2.65M subscribers) and TikTok (450K followers) channels, respectively.
