Page 20 - foodservice magazine April 2019

20
TRADE TALK
Clockwise from main: 8bit CBD. Bar Ume's chicken katsu burger. Kerby Craig at Bar Ume.
We’ve all seen a hyper-trend- based foodservice business whose fodder is designed to photograph well first, and taste good second. But while Craig calls this food “the lowest hanging fruit,” McCallum says he’ll “never diss Instagram”, as it’s been a factor in their success.
“We pride ourselves on being
very Instagrammable. The colours, the box, which we designed for our burgers to sit in.” He’s talking about the box that props the burger upright, ready for a cross-section snap.
8bit has over 30,000 followers on Instagram, and the hastag #burger is used on over 13 million photos on Instagram. No doubt by the time this story goes to print that number will be higher.
But McCallum and Craig agree that the burger fanaticism reached its peak roughly three years ago, and has just started to slow down in the last 12 months.
“It’s getting a bit saturated. There’s a burger place on every corner,” says McCallum, who says that despite wanting to expand 8bit to Brisbane and Adelaide, has held back because of the high volume of local joints.
“It becomes a bubble. Everywhere you turn there’s a hamburger and people get bored of it and go, ‘Nah it’s all the same’,” adds Craig.
Craig believes that to stay relevant, you need to do something different and create your own demand.
“I don’t want to jump in the pool with everyone, I want my own pool,” he says. “If you create your own pool, your business will always be a little bit more insulated. We’re part of the burger craze because
we came out at the right time, [but Ume] is a standalone thing, and that’s what I wanted to create.”
Japanese burger culture is not new, in fact it emerged after WWII due to the American presence in the country. Now, he says, some chefs in Japan take burgers very seriously.
“Japanese food is all about balance. It’s easy to put a bunch of shit in, but to cook something simply takes skill and confidence. So these Japanese