What happens when your food business goes viral?

If you fancy your chances of securing one of Chatsworth Bakehouse’s famous loaves on the weekend, you can expect to find yourself in a queue of up to two hours. “Some bus drivers have stopped outside, come in and bought a loaf and then left,” the Crystal Palace-based shop’s co-owner Sian Evans tells me. “The queue will let the bus driver quickly park up the bus and buy a loaf. And we’re on a main road. It’s completely wild”. You could pin your hopes on pre-ordering a sandwich instead, but they tend to sell out in three minutes every week. But how did food get to this point?

In the age of TikTok, virality can skyrocket a business’s popularity overnight, whipping up hype sometimes with little rhyme or reason. Take Binley Mega Chippy, an unpretentious chip shop in Coventry that, unbeknownst to staff, went viral on TikTok due to a catchy song made by a local. Or there’s Urban Tandoor, a Bristol-based Indian restaurant that’s inspired silly music video parodies that have so far accumulated 8.5 million likes and caught the attention of The New York Times.

But is the fame and fortune that accompanies virality all that it seems? Dan Martensen found his Primrose Hill-based, NYC-inspired eatery It’s Bagels thrust into the TikTok spotlight almost immediately after opening in September 2023 when an influencer reposted his video. “Everything from the outside seemed like it was going great, but it was not going as well on the inside,” he tells me. “We were running out of eggs and bacon. I found myself working at odd hours of the day and night, shopping for as many eggs as I could fit in my car at Waitrose at 10pm, begging them to let me in before they shut their doors. We had a few employees that were definitely expecting to work in a sleepy little cafe in Primrose Hill – when they realised that they were going to be on their feet for eight to 10 hours a day working to serve queues that were 200 people long, they complained, or they quit.”

The stress that came with such attention quickly took a toll on Martensen’s health. “I’d be getting four hours of sleep a night for the first month or so. I’m looking at my wife, like ‘why does it feel like I’m going to die’,” he jokes. “It was the amount of pressure that I put on myself as much as anything.”

Social media hype has the power to generate a surge in sales for a business like Martensen’s, but it will also open you up to criticism. “You make a little splash and suddenly everyone has an opinion they’re more than happy to give you,” he says. There are also the neighbours to consider, who “don’t like queues and don’t like the smell of bagels”. Did Martensen ever foresee such a whirlwind opening? “It was a lot more than I expected, honestly. I never thought in a million years it would [be] this way. I was worried we’d ordered too many coffee cups.”

Things are now in much better shape at It’s Bagels, although you can still expect daily queues that snake across the road. Looking back on the time his business went viral, Martensen admits he wished it had gone differently. “I would have preferred we didn’t go viral for at least six months. I’d like to have got it figured out [first].”

Evans, who runs Chatsworth Bakehouse with her partner Tom Mathews, shares a similar tale of bedlam fuelled by social media a year after they opened in 2021. “Saturday was a whole different ball game. It was out of control. I used to play in a band, and it used to feel like every Saturday we were building up to a gig. It was really stressful.” Evans has since hired someone to manage the queue and sate the appetites of pastry lovers. “They’ll tell everyone what’s going on, what’s selling and what’s not selling, and give them tasters. It’s really helped us.”

To further cope with the crowds, Chatsworth Bakehouse has acquired a new store, located a few doors down, that will be opening this month. But virality is not something Evans is wishing for this time round. “I’m not intentionally hoping it goes viral again, at all actually. I think people are a bit nervous about viral businesses.”

Online hype and the perils of massive queues has been a contentious subject in the restaurant industry over the last 10 years, whether it’s the infamous Padella queue in Borough Market, or the hourly wait for a coveted table at any branch of Dishoom. But oddly enough, for Evans, it’s the locals who love the queue: “Someone said to me recently, ‘I really hope when you open the other shop, you’re not going to get rid of the queue, because I get to speak to people every week’.” Evans has even witnessed customers bring fold-up chairs sometimes an hour and a half before her shop opens at 11am on Saturdays, reading their book and chatting to people to fill time. “It reminds me of waiting for theatre tickets or something.”

open image in gallery

While virality was unintentional for Evans and Martensen, hundreds of businesses clamour for such a wide and rapid level of attention, employing marketing agencies in the hopes of becoming the next hyped internet phenomenon. And why wouldn’t they? If a business’s objective is to make money, and going viral can promise this, wouldn’t they all fancy their chances at setting the internet ablaze?

But Hannah Norris, founder of restaurant PR agency Nourish, argues that maintaining momentum following the hype is often the hardest part. “Once [a customer] has the table, you’ve got to make it a brilliant experience or they’ll not come back and then you’ve lost all that potential revenue,” she says. “It’s one thing to be an Instagram sensation, it’s quite another to be successful in years to come after that. One is a one-night stand. The other is marriage.” The latter, she says, takes commitment: “You’ve got to keep feeding it and investing in it emotionally and financially, otherwise it will die.”

This is the approach that Jack and Beyond has adopted. The Battersea-based bakery experienced first hand viral fame in June last year, after competitive eater and YouTuber BeardMeetsFood visited the store to try its bottomless cake experience. But rather than relying on one video (it currently has 9.6 million views) to maintain the buzz, the bakery continually offers free experiences to other nano-influencers. “Last time we had an influencer here, [their] video got 140,000 views, so [we saw] quite a nice spike. All these frequent visits keep us busy.”

Mark Smith, director of food and beverage social media marketing agency Double Up Social, works with brands to help engineer viral moments. “We often get people saying to us, ‘can you help us go viral?’ and sometimes that can be a red flag because people expect to go viral overnight,” he says. “Yes, some do, but it’s from a lot of trial and error – it’s very likely the first product isn’t going to go viral.” Smith adds that it’s not as simple as posting a trendy reel and waiting for views to rack up. “There’s a lot of luck to it as well. There’s only so many ways you can trick the algorithm using trending audio, but the offering must be unique or creative in some way.”

open image in gallery

Isabel Burke, PR and marketing manager at Liverpool-based Nineteen Agency, encourages her clients to stay clear of jumping on social trends. “Social media users are savvier now, and they understand that they are constantly being sold to,” she says. “They don’t want that sort of desperation for virality. Pulling a stunt might get you some views and comments for a couple of weeks but does that necessarily translate into sales?”

Martensen, who jokes that TikTok has become “the new Michelin star-rating system,” questions the whole enterprise. “As much as you have to use the internet to drive sales in a positive way, the real challenge is the product, the people you’re serving and the people that work in your shop. Without those ingredients you don’t have anything, you just have hype.”

He thinks that social media can only help your business to an extent. “As we grow with social media, we’re starting to see a difference between hype and substance and it’s important to focus on the substance. I’d rather have a great bagel shop that a few people know about, than a popular, crappy bagel shop.”

Evans, who has admitted to visiting places off the back of their hype in the past, now fully swerves the latest social media sensation du jour. “I would rather buy from somewhere [after someone] tells me, ‘That was absolutely insane, I loved it’,” she says, “rather than ‘I saw this thing online, I went there, and now it’s fallen down on its face because it tastes like crap and the people were really rude to me’.”