Most FMCG brands pay influencers to promote food. Fortune Foods attracted 50,000 home cooks to become influencers instead.
India’s influencer marketing industry is worth over ₹10,000 crore. Almost every FMCG brand is spending lakhs fighting over the same 100-200 food creators.
Same faces, same recipes, same branded posts.
At Influencer.in, we went to Fortune Foods with a different pitch this year – instead of hiring creators, let’s build new ones from scratch.
That’s how the Fortune Influencer Masterclass was born. The concept was simple – give regular home cooks real training, actual tools, and a platform to showcase their talent.
Not celebrities or established creators. Just regular Indians who love cooking and never had a shot at turning it into something bigger.
Over 4 months, we ran a multi-stage evaluation:
→ Integrated Partnership with MasterChef on TV & Digital across media & in-show placement
→ MasterChef winners and contestants judged top entries
→ Criteria went beyond cooking – video editing, plating, storytelling, and even animation
→ 250 shortlisted creators got expert-led training, essential creator tools, and direct mentorship via a portal we built
→ Winners got trained by Meghna Kamdar, a Forbes Top 100 Digital Star with 5M+ followers
The results:
→ 50,000 registrations with zero paid promotion
→ 25 winners actually got annual content deals worth up to ₹2 lakhs each, with Fortune Foods
At the felicitation event in Ahmedabad, we watched some of these winners tear up on stage and share how they’d been posting recipes for years with barely any views just 4 months ago, and now creating content for such a renowned FMCG brand.
That moment reminded me why we started Influencer.in in the first place.
Proud to have built this with Fortune Foods as part of their 25-year celebration.
What’s the smartest influencer campaign you’ve seen recently?
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