I was giving a talk on entrepreneurship to a group of students at my old secondary school today and we started discussing how to marry up your passions with cool business ideas.
One of the students was a ‘foodie’ so we spent 20 minutes or so kicking around business ideas that would suit. In addition to the kinds of ideas you’d expect (start a restaurant, launch catering business, that kind of thing) we came up with a few ideas that, on first inspection, sound pretty cool.
When someone mentioned the idea of becoming a food critic, we pitched ideas about creating the next Zagats or Michelin guide (with all sorts of interesting angles) and then finally settled on the idea of critics as consultants. A kind of poacher turned gamekeeper play.
Food Critic 2.0
Restaurants (and plenty of other businesses for that matter) depend on positive reviews and critiques in the media. They also need good quality, independent feedback to identify areas for improvement and highlight what’s working.
Mystery shopping can help address this in some ways but who better to produce useful reviews that former professional critics?
An aspiring entrepreneur could hire a handful of freelance newspaper and guidebook critics to visit restaurants, check the place out and provide detailed – private – critiques back to the owners. The owners would then stand a better chance of improving their reviews and raising the bar for their paying customers.
The same could be done with almost any industry where the critics matter – and although I’d guess this kind of business already exists, it’s a pretty decent idea for a handful of 16 year olds to knock out in 20 minutes.
Update: I got an email through from Simon Owens with an interesting titbit – for the first time, the latest Michelin reports have actually given more 3-star ratings to Tokyo restaurants than Paris ones. Thanks Simon.
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