Growing up Kahja Elliott always liked food – and a backstory.
Elliott started Kay in the Bay as a way for her to get to know the Bay Area through food after moving there from the East Coast, but the way she approaches storytelling ultimately stems from that desire to always know how things are made and what makes people who they are.
“Kay in the Bay is a platform about all of the different ways we can interact with food that encourages communities,” she said. “It’s enjoying food in your home. It’s talking about and sharing information about brands. It’s discovering the food that is so amazing in your own locality. It’s absolutely having fun traveling with food.”
Food is a unifying factor of why her audience engages with her, Elliott said.
“I think it is the thing right at the top of the list – if not the top of the list – of how people express love and culture and home and memory and family and all of those things that are so core to people,” she said.
But there are other things that draw people into Elliott’s work. It’s her authenticity.
“I really am being myself. I think my most authentic, most resonant content is what I shoot in my studio, my kitchen – right over here – because I’m home. I’m in my familiar surroundings, and I’m just talking to the camera, and it’s very natural, because I’m in my most comfortable place, so I’m talking the way I would be talking to a friend.”
“I’m a single woman,” she said. “I’m an empty nester. Believe it or not, I’m somebody’s grandmother, and I love that the way I just run the streets and frolic about it just gives people permission to do that or to relive that through watching me do it.”
While Elliott is providing information and creating community, it’s also essential that she and her audience simply have fun.
“I like to have a good time….And I really am just having fun with this.” she said. “I think that’s the thing that I most want people who watch this to take away from it. Go have a good time. I just happen to be doing this in relation to food, but I want them to take away the experience of, ‘Go live your life and have a good time!’”
Elliott also hosts the As Told By podcast, which she describes as a mix of How I Built This and Inside the Actor’s Studio, where she interviews people across intersections of the food industry.
“You know that chef that just got a James Beard,” she said. “You’ve had that brand in your cabinet for years, but don’t really know anything about them.”
Elliott’s intention is that there will be a vertical for everyone to meet them wherever they are in their experience of community with food.
The News Creator Corps fellowship provided a way for Elliott to bridge from content creation “a truer representation of food media,” which is her ultimate goal.
“I felt like I had the content piece down, but I don’t work in media,” she said. “I don’t come from a journalistic background, and so I was actively looking for ways to create a little bit more journalistic rigor around the things that I was doing. And this was a perfect fit.”
So far, Elliott said the News Creator Corps program has already led her to launching a new weekly feature where she tells her audiences four stories in food they should know about. It started as a homework assignment, but when she asked her audience if she should turn it into regular programming, they resoundingly told her yes.
She said she also had a good time making a video using public records.
“I was racking my brain, because I’m like, ‘Public records? You do food content. What do these things have to do with each other?’” she said. “And it just so happened earlier that week, Smuckers sued Trader Joe’s for product infringement from their Uncrustable sandwiches. And so I went out and bought a box of each and I did a comparative taste test.”
“I made it about what I do,” Elliott said. “It was like the perfect marriage of what this program is all about….It got really good traction. People were entertained and informed.”
Elliott said she’s learning important skills and how to apply them to her work in a way that will prepare her for the future.
“I feel like I’m getting ready for a moment that I don’t know when it is coming, but I want to be ready to meet it when it gets here,” she said.