Yes Chef Group's Jack Goldberg on building a $100M+ food media empire from restaurant videos and live events
Key Points
- Yes Chef Group partners with 101 Studios to launch Yes Chef Studios, a long-form production arm backed by the Yellowstone and Landman producers, positioning itself as the next Food Network.
- The four-year-old food media company now operates as a $100M+ business across short-form content, live events including festivals and brand activations with PepsiCo, and invite-only dinners for celebrities and high-net-worth individuals.
- Goldberg argues AI restaurant recommendations fail because they pull from unreliable public data like paid review placements, creating an opening for human judgment in food discovery that remains unsolved.
Summary
Read full transcript →Yes Chef Group
Jack Goldberg co-founded Yes Chef Group four years ago with his college friend Liam, starting with a single restaurant video in New York that hit a quarter-million views. Both were working in management consulting at the time — Goldberg at PwC, Liam at Capgemini — and the early operation was about as scrappy as it sounds: work until 8PM, go to dinner, film, edit until 3AM, post, repeat.
The business now describes itself as a $100M+ food media and events company, and the trajectory from that first video runs through a lucky dinner-table encounter with the then-CEO of Sports Illustrated's parent company, Authentic Brands. After pitching him on the spot, Goldberg and Liam landed a deal within a week — consulting salary match plus a 50/50 revenue split — and never went back to their day jobs.
“We went and did that first video, and it did like a quarter million views, and we were like, oh shit. We have a golden triangle of content, community, and products. We're building the largest and most engaged food community in the entire world, and we don't need to rush to monetize that right away.”
The event business
The first meaningful expansion beyond content was the Yes Chef Food Festival in New York, which sold out on two posts. That was roughly two and a half years ago. The festival has since run twice in New York and once in Los Angeles, with the most recent New York edition disrupted by a storm. Current capacity is around 10,000 people.
The live events portfolio has since layered out across different consumer profiles. Yes Chef Tailgates, launched in partnership with PepsiCo, are running at Penn State, University of Florida, and Texas A&M this season, with an NFL activation to follow. Yes Chef Reserve sits at the opposite end — invite-only dinners for celebrities, athletes, and high-net-worth guests. A separate health-focused format, the Wrong Club, rounds out the lineup.
Goldberg's argument for why events reinforce rather than dilute the content business is straightforward: getting 10 people in a room on a Tuesday night is harder than getting 10 million views on a video, and doing both proves you've built something more than a viral account.
Yes Chef Studios
The biggest announcement is a partnership with 101 Studios — David Glasser and Tyler Sheridan's production company behind Yellowstone, Landman, and Tulsa King — to launch Yes Chef Studios, a long-form content arm. Goldberg describes it as the next Food Network, focused on surfacing new talent and producing series-level food programming rather than short-form clips.
The logic for partnering rather than building in-house is simple: they could spend five to ten years trying to crack long-form themselves, or they could go straight to the best operators in the business. The studio deal is where most of their near-term hiring focus sits — editors and videographers to build out the production capability.
Monetization posture
Goldberg is deliberate about not rushing product launches. The framing is that Yes Chef is building the largest engaged food community in the world, and monetization should follow conviction rather than opportunity. PepsiCo is already a major brand partner — a full circle moment, given Goldberg's first PwC project was a Pepsi consulting engagement. But the broader bet is that attention compounds, and the content, studio, and events flywheel will create durable value without needing to ship a product for its own sake.
He also hints at something in development around digestion — a consumer product of some kind — though nothing concrete is disclosed.
Where AI falls short
On restaurant recommendations, Goldberg argues AI pulls from public data that is itself unreliable — Uber Eats reviews, for instance, are partly paid placements — so the outputs lack the intuitive judgment about a chef or kitchen that makes a recommendation actually useful. Recipes are fine; recommendations are not. He sees it as a genuine opportunity in the food space, just one that hasn't been solved yet.
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