How Abbey Fish Built a Conference Empire for Food Creators

Abbey Fish didn’t set out to build a conference. She set out to answer one question that kept landing in her inbox: How do you actually make money doing this?

After starting as a fashion blogger in 2009, pivoting to food content through a site called The Butter Half, and spending nearly two decades in the creator trenches, Abbey launched Tastemaker Conference — a community, education platform, and annual in-person event built specifically for food creators. The 10th Tastemaker is coming up in January 2027 in San Antonio, Texas. That’s not a vanity milestone. That’s evidence of a business model that actually works.

This conversation covers how she built it, what nearly killed it, why she thinks AI is the best thing to happen to creators, and what food creators consistently get wrong when trying to go sustainable.

Starting a Multi-Hundred Person Event With Zero Event Experience

Most people who want to build a community start small — a newsletter, a Discord, a free cohort. Abbey started by planning a conference for hundreds of people with no prior event experience. She’s the first to admit that was borderline insane.

“Most people, like, it was insane for me to be like, I think I’m going to start with planning a 100 multi-hundred person event. Like, who does that? That is like not a normal thing that people do. I have a tendency to like build things backward.”

She leaned on volunteers, tapped relationships she’d already built with brands through her creator work, and operated on what she calls “delusional faith.” It paid off — Tastemaker was profitable in its first year. Not because she had a perfect playbook, but because she had a pre-existing network of people who already trusted her and understood the gap she was filling.

The gap was simple and real: content creators — especially food bloggers — were working in isolation, had no roadmap for building a business, and had nowhere to connect with peers who understood their specific world. General marketing conferences weren’t the answer. Neither was winging it alone at home.

What Abbey saw clearly was that the food blogging community already had a built-in “creator army” — people who’d independently grown audiences and knew how to build things. They just needed a place to come together. Tastemaker gave the embers oxygen.

The Pandemic Pivot That Created New Product Lines

Then COVID hit. Events businesses got gutted. Tastemaker stayed open, moved to virtual, and used that forced transition to build infrastructure they wouldn’t have built otherwise. New community products. New digital offerings. A more diversified model.

Abbey doesn’t romanticize it — she calls the revenue impact on event-dependent businesses brutal and accurate. But the lesson she draws is practical: the thing that looks like it’s going to destroy your business is often the thing that forces you to build a more durable version of it.

Why In-Person Events Are Getting More Valuable, Not Less

There’s a counterintuitive trend happening that Abbey is actively tracking: as AI-generated content floods the internet, people are getting better at detecting it — and they’re actively seeking out what’s human. That shift is driving demand for in-person experiences, not away from them.

“There’s a really interesting trend happening right now. We’re actively tracking and seeing the shift because of AI — because humans are becoming more adept at understanding this was made by a human, this was made by a machine, and craving like human interaction and human creativity.”

The dynamic she describes is a flywheel: creators use digital platforms to build audiences, those audiences crave real human connection, and in-person events become the place where that connection gets reinforced and deepened. The online presence and the in-person experience aren’t competing — they’re feeding each other.

This is why she encourages any digital-first creator or business to start doing more in-person events, not fewer. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a response to what the data on human behavior is actually showing.

AI Is Not Killing Food Creators — Lazy Content Strategy Is

Abbey dropped a podcast episode the same day as this interview with a hot take: AI is the best thing that could have happened to creators. She stands by it, but the nuance matters.

Yes, some food creators in her community saw up to an 80% drop in ad revenue as AI disrupted search traffic and media spend. That’s not a minor blip — that’s a livelihood crisis. But Abbey argues that disruption forced creators to stop depending on a single fragile revenue stream and start building the things that actually create long-term business value: memberships, in-person experiences, email lists, direct audience relationships.

The mistake she calls out is using AI as a clone of yourself — outsourcing the parts of your work that are actually your competitive advantage. She specifically flags avatar technology that replicates a creator’s likeness as a shortcut that destroys the thing that makes creators valuable in the first place.

Her framework: use AI as an assistant. Let it handle organization, editing support, code fixes, workflow automation. Don’t let it write your recipes, take your opinions, or replace your face on camera.

“A robot doesn’t have taste buds and it never will,” she says. That’s not a throwaway line — it’s the core of why food creators specifically have staying power that AI can’t replicate. The sensory, emotional, personal connection to food is not something that can be automated. The moment a food creator tries to automate that part, they’ve given up the only thing that made them worth following.

What Actually Separates Sustainable Food Creators from One-Hit Wonders

Abbey has a clear-eyed view of why some creators build businesses and others just get a viral moment. The difference isn’t production quality, posting frequency, or platform strategy. It’s whether there’s a real person with a real point of view behind the content.

She points to what went wrong with the food blogging wave: creators tried to templatize everything. They systematized and automated until the content lost its soul. The ones who survived — and thrived — maintained a personal connection to the food they were making. There was a story. An ancestry. A reason.

Her practical advice for anyone starting out in food content:

• Niche hard. The food content market is saturated. A strong, specific niche is what hooks people. Ancestral recipes, a specific dietary approach, a regional cuisine you have genuine ties to — specificity cuts through noise.
• Find your story. The food you make needs a personal connection behind it. Not manufactured. Not performed. Real.
• Own your platform. Social media reach can disappear overnight. An email list and a website are assets you control. Build them from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Become an expert in video. Whether it’s TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram Reels, video is non-negotiable. Put your resources there.
• Find community. The isolation of solo content creation is real and it compounds over time. Being around other creators who understand the business side accelerates everything.

Creators Are Media Companies — Whether They Act Like It or Not

Abbey makes the case bluntly: when 60–70% of millennials, Gen Z, and younger audiences get the majority of their information from creators rather than traditional news outlets, that’s not just influence — that’s media power. And with that power comes accountability.

She draws a parallel between content creation and academia that’s actually useful: just like academic credibility is established through citations and sourcing, creator credibility is established through accuracy, expert positioning, and being the person others reference. AI search engines are now surfacing sources the same way — based on authority, expertise, and trustworthiness. Creators who do the work to build genuine expertise will be the ones that AI cites. Creators who cut corners won’t.

For food creators specifically, that’s showing up as a real trend: creators going back to culinary school, getting formal training, or leaning harder into their specific cultural expertise so their food knowledge is grounded in something verifiable.

The Vision for Tastemaker at Year 10 and Beyond

Tastemaker Conference’s 10th annual event runs January 8–9, 2027, in San Antonio, Texas. It’s capped at 600 attendees — large enough to generate real networking value, small enough to maintain the community feel that Abbey considers non-negotiable.

Abbey’s five-year vision includes international expansion, new community products launching in the coming months, and positioning Tastemaker as the go-to ecosystem for food creators who want to understand what’s on the edge of content creation — not just the basics, but the business strategy, the cultural shifts, and the peer relationships that actually move the needle.

She’s also completing a master’s in digital sociology, with a thesis focused on how the creator economy is renegotiating power across gender, race, and the relationship between creators and platform capitalism. The academic work and the business work are deeply intertwined — Tastemaker has always been, at its core, about giving creators ownership and agency over their work and their livelihoods.

If you’re a food creator or thinking about becoming one, Vidpros readers can use promo code JOINUS100 for $100 off Tastemaker Conference 2027 registration at eventmobi.com/website/tc2027.