How Often and How Do Chefs Communicate

The highlights of this overview are the many indicators found, such as the bio, the total number of posts, number of followers, number of following, and posts during the two years. All detailed numbers can be found in table A. in the appendix.

4.2 How Often and How Do Chefs Communicate

Figure 4: The frequency of posts during the two-year timeframe

4.2.2 Topics of Communication

The second part of this subchapter is about what topics the chefs chose to talk about, as well as their similarities and differences. The topics are derived from the first cycle of coding, when each post was assigned a prevalent topic. Surprisingly, although the accounts vary in the number of followers and posts, they all cover roughly the same number of topics. It did not matter if they post 100 or 1,000 times or have 10,000 or 200,000 followers, they all communicate about an average of 18 different topics. There is little deviation from this average, and there are no

excep-98 208

320

175 287

177 1.003

558

123 144 297

519

89 576

188

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

Colagreco Redzepi

Anand Kofoed

Martínez Leó

n Aduriz

Passard Castro

Xatruch Tsumura

Hasegawa Olvera

Mukhin Atxa

Frequency of Posts during Timeframe

tions. Graph 3 depicts a visual representation of the detailed number of topics for each chef, as well as the average trend line.

Figure 5: The total number of topics with average trendline

Further topic analysis revealed different patterns. The topics the chefs communi-cate about via social media go beyond their business—that is, the restaurant or the food—so it cannot be concluded that they simply advertise their business. None-theless, advertising does play a big role on social media channels like Instagram, and I will discuss this further in chapter 5. It is worth highlighting that only two chefs, Mukhin and Anand, explicitly advertise by cooperating with brands; even they do so only rarely, and the other chefs do not advertise at all—at least not in marked and paid forms.

There is a predominant theme when comparing the top five topics in terms of how often they are mentioned. This predominant theme can be summarized as the pro-fessional theme: It includes the topics DISH, FOOD, INDUSTRY, INGREDIENT, POP UP, RECIPE, RESTAURANT, and TEAM.⁷ For all chefs, at least three out of their top five topics stem from the professional theme; for 73% of chefs, it is four out of the

7 For all detailed descriptions and definitions of the codes, refer to the codebook in the appen-dix.

18 19 21 23

21 17

24

17 17 17

23 25

14 25

18

0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Colagreco Redze

pi Anand

Kofoed Martínez

León Aduriz

Passard Castro

Xatruch Tsumura

Hasegawa Olvera

Mukhin Atxa

Total number of Topics

top five; and for 13% it is five out of five. The culinary context and success of the people behind the accounts in the analog world explain the predominant profession-al theme. The most mentioned topic overprofession-all is INDUSTRY for the majority of cases (except for two accounts). I will further discuss this result in connection with how the chefs’ accounts function as nodes of communication.

While the predominant topics in the top five apply to the the professional theme, there is an interesting finding regarding the remaining top topic(s). For each chef there is at least one topic that fits the professional theme and follows no pattern among the group, which means that it is individual for every chef. This topic seems to represent the individual character of each chef’s Instagram account; for example, for Anand it is HUMOR, for Aduriz it is FAMILY, and for Redzepi it is POLITICAL POSITION. Although the accounts have many similarities, they are also clearly distinctive; one of the key differences is the top topic that shapes the individual account character. All detailed numbers⁸ and ranks for each chef’s top five topics are displayed in table A.3 in the appendix.

I also analyzed how the very bottom of the list of topics looks like, and it is surpris-ingly similar. For most accounts, CHARITY was the least mentioned topic. This means that it does not seem to play too important of a role on the Instagram ac-counts of these chefs, but it also means that all of the chefs talk about CHARITY on Instagram at least some of the time.

In the last step, I consider topics that form exceptions. FISH and RELIGION are both exceptions and are considered because of two specific accounts. FISH is part of the codebook because Zaiyu Hasegawa talks about fish extremely often—in 16.8% of all his posts—making it the second-most mentioned topic. It is thus one of the top five topics that represent his character trait. He usually posts a picture of himself and the fish (see Figure 6) and then explains in the text different aspects of where he fished, how, with whom, and what kind of fish is shown. Hasegawa also talks about fishing gear, and fishing is always part of his travel. If he is not able to fish himself, he buys fresh fish but presents it in the same manner as shown in

Fig-8 The ratio to the total amount of topics for each account was considered to make the chef's ac-counts comparable, although they vary in size.

ure 6. In Hasegawa’s case, fish is not only a hobby or state of mind—it also repre-sents his philosophy and is connected to his profession, as he can prepare, eat, share with friends, and even sell it. I address this type of complexity further in the discussion chapter.

Figure 6: This facial expression is usual for him if he shows his fishing results (Instagram post from @zaiyuhasegawa on September 20, 2020)

Another outstanding topic is RELIGION. This code was only introduced because Mukhin talks about religion in his posts.⁹ Although he only posted about it twice, it is worth mentioning because it demonstrates the breadth of topics that are ad-dressed on Instagram. Talking about religion goes beyond the different profession-al and is a deeply personprofession-al topic, which is different from sharing snapshots of one’s family or other personal experiences. This seems particularly noteworthy in the context of Mukhin’s 188,000 followers and the total of 3,935 likes garnered for both posts combined, not least because some of those followers are colleagues, employ-ees, and investors.¹⁰

9 Posts from @muhinvladimir on April 18, 2020, and February 15, 2020 have the code RELI-GION.

10 Compare insights into followership in chapter 1.