Health check: Behind the scenes at Good Food’s popular new social media sub-brand
With misinformation reaching epidemic levels online, one established brand has created a particularly effective antidote. Good Food, for so long a bastion of promoting culinary health, has officially launched a new sub-brand to bust myths around wellbeing and teach its readers how to stay in tip top shape. And the way they are delivering these doses of science-based facts, is through the short, sharp hits of social media.
Showcasing trusted health journalism, Good Health by Good Food posts videos 5-6 times a week across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Myth-busting wellness advice are dispensed by an expert in-house team and specialist influencers like author Melissa Hemsley (@melissa.hemsley), Dr Divya Sharma (@drbowl), Jordan Haworth (@mrguthealth) and Dr Chintal Patel (@drchintalskitchen).
“There is such an enormous amount of disinformation on social platforms, especially around health,” says Good Food’s Health Editor Emma Hartfield. “Only 2% of nutritional info on TikTok is actually factually correct (according to research by DCU Business School). I’ve got two teenage daughters, and I know the sort of stuff that they come to me with.
“So, we were really attracted by the idea of being able to bring our knowledge and our authority to social media platforms where there are such big audiences. It also means targeting a slightly younger audience than the Good Food magazine or the website does.”
Good Health by Good Food had a soft launch in September – and the figures are already impressive. The sub-brand’s social channels have gained 9.8m impressions, 4.3m video views and 480,000 engagements, as well as 8.26k followers.
“We didn’t really know what to expect, to be honest. If you’re starting from zero, then you don’t know how it’s going to go,” says Hartfield. “Obviously, having the established Good Food feeds to occasionally collaborate with has helped, as well as our influencers.
“Once we decided to go for it, we actually got it out there very quickly. Part of the reason for doing a soft launch was that we could build up the feed. We’ve made one new hire and apart from that, it’s been of all hands on deck, making as many videos as we can and learning on the job as we’ve gone along.”
Four pillars and a solid foundation
Good Health by Good Food’s content is distributed along four core pillars – Healthy eating (including sharing recipes for Fibremaxxed sweet potato brownies and viral Marry-me butter beans), Wellbeing, Fitness and Your Health, which features current myth-busting videos on topics like sleep, gut health, supplements, weight loss jabs, diabetes and women’s health.
“One of our best, most engaged videos on TikTok is our in-house nutritionist looking at ultra-processed foods and how you can actually eat UPFs for a whole day and it not be terribly bad for you and shorten your lifespan,” says Hartfield.
“Also, our Deputy Health Editor Issie Keeling has done a series on the most unhinged things she’s seen on TikTok – leaning into some of the nonsense and showing people they can’t believe everything they see. We want to be that place for them to come. We want to be the brand that they can trust.”
Fortunately for Good Health by Good Food, it’s attached to a brand that has built up trust with readers for almost four decades. Launched in 1989, Good Food has blossomed into the UK’s leading food media brand with a monthly print magazine, website, app and series of books celebrating the joys of culinary creations.
Known as BBC Good Food until 2024, rights to the brand were acquired by Immediate Media in 2018. And Good Food is only growing stronger with a new podcast and print supplement in the pipeline. It’s a rich history that has given Good Health by Good Food the perfect base to work off.
“We’ve spent over 35 years building a brand on recipe trust,” says Lulu Grimes, Head of Brand Trust for Good Food. “Everything else we’ve ever done, and this includes the health side of things, builds on what we’d already established.
“We’re a legacy brand, we’re a household name and for a lot of people we’re the first brand they find when they look for recipes. We’ve established a certain base and that’s why it’s really important to keep building on that by never compromising on our information.”
A dose of reality
Good Food did extensive research before launching Good Health by Good Food. The launch of the sub-brand is supported by a whitepaper from Good Food – ‘How the UK Really Eats’ – which exposes a lack of trust and clarity, particularly among young people, about how to eat healthily.
The study, which was commissioned by YouGov and has over 2,100 respondents, reveals 26% of UK adults believe nutritional advice is often confusing or overwhelming. One in five (21%) do not know which sources to trust, with nearly a quarter (24%) stating they would welcome clearer, more straightforward guidance.
This confusion is leading young adults to unverified sources, making them vulnerable to misinformation. For the 18-24 age group, social media (31%) is their top source for nutritional information, trumping the NHS or Government websites (27%) and well ahead of those who turn to doctors and health professionals (17%) or traditional food media (17%).
For Good Health by Good Food the stakes are high, then, to try and turn the tide towards the truth. In doing so the brand takes into account that every reader has a different relationship towards food and staying healthy.
“One of the things that we do as a brand is we try very hard to stay rooted in the reality of how people live,” says Grimes. “So even through we test our recipes in a big test kitchen, it’s full of domestic appliances we know people use in their lives.
“And that also goes across the health content. We know that young people don’t necessarily have very much money or very much time, but we also know that they quite like trend recipes or, they might want to try something new. So, we do follow trends, across different age groups, but we’re also very mindful of what they actually might have available to them to use.”
In handing out advice, Good Health by Good Food is also careful not to come across as judgemental or make people feel bad about their food and drink choices.
“We’re trying to remove a lot of the stress and the guilt around health,” explains Hartfield. “So, of January, we haven’t covered dieting and weight loss. We’ve covered how to eat more healthily by adding more plants to your plate.
“And we haven’t covered giving up alcohol. Instead, I wrote a feature last year about different ways to cut down your alcohol intake and what might work for different people.
I don’t think it’s helpful to make people feel bad about themselves. We as a brand are all about making eating enjoyable. And that’s the same when it comes to health as well.”
