Zero Click Discovery
Why good content gets missed.
It’s been a minute.
The last time I hit send, it was November. Since then, I’ve been writing, consulting, testing, rebuilding systems, and paying close attention to how food content is actually behaving out in the world, not how we wish it behaved.
This is the place where food creators learn the tech behind discoverability and build content that lasts.
So consider this a quiet reset.
Not a “new year, new you” moment. I don’t really believe in resolutions.
Instead, I’m thinking about 3 questions as we start 2026:
What am I keeping from 2025?
What am I done doing?
What am I finally ready to start?
This issue lives right at that intersection.
The News Nobody Wanted to Read
This week, Food52 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
That sentence landed hard, not because Food52 failed to build an audience, but because it did almost everything we tell content brands to do:
Build trust
Invest in quality
Create community
Expand into commerce
And still, it wasn’t enough.
According to reporting from TheStreet and Adweek:
Roughly 40% of Food52’s staff were laid off earlier this year
The company entered court-supervised reorganization
It had been exploring a sale for months
It aimed for $60M in revenue in 2025, while remaining unprofitable
This isn’t a story about one bad decision.
It’s a story about how difficult it has become to turn content into something sustainable, especially when discovery no longer guarantees a visit.
Nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a click.
Another large share stays inside Google-owned properties.
Only a fraction ever reaches the open web.
People are still cooking. Still searching.Still consuming food content.
They’re just not clicking the way they used to.
A Measured Take (not doom)
If you’re a creator reading this and feeling uneasy, pause.
Food52’s situation isn’t proof that food content is over.
It’s evidence that the old assumptions about distribution are breaking.
Large, ad-driven content businesses are hit hardest because they depend on:
traffic they don’t control
monetization tied directly to clicks
scale that’s expensive to maintain
Most individual creators aren’t operating at that scale—and that’s not a weakness.
Creators can adapt faster.
They can redesign structure without replatforming an entire company.
They can build content systems for the world we’re in now, not the one we miss.
The lesson isn’t “publish less.”
It’s “stop treating traffic as the finish line.”
What This Means for You
In a zero-click world, the question changes.
It’s no longer just:
“How do I get people to my site?”
It becomes:
When my content shows up without me, does it still make sense?
If a platform summarizes my work, is it pulling the right information?
When someone comes back weeks later, can they recognize what they’re looking for?
This is where structure starts to matter more than reach.
And this is where creators like Nelly come in.
New Year with Nelly
Nelly lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Her family is Diné (Navajo), and food has always been how knowledge moved through generations—hands showing hands, stories told while something simmered, techniques passed down without names or measurements.
She grew up learning how to:
stretch ingredients
cook with what’s available
respect time, heat, and patience
Nelly’s a zillennial, balancing tradition with tech.
Her dinners are practical, joyful, and deeply rooted:
blue corn tortillas turned into weeknight tacos
slow-simmered beans reworked into 20-minute meals
ancestral techniques adapted for modern kitchens
Her blog is called Nelly Dine Kitchen.
Her main platform?
YouTube Shorts.
That’s where her audience lives. That’s where she teaches. That’s where her recipes move.
And for a while, it worked.
The moment everything stalled
Nelly didn’t lose motivation.
She didn’t stop posting.
She didn’t “fall off.”
What changed was subtler.
Her videos kept performing… inconsistently.
Some shorts took off. Others vanished.
People commented things like “Why doesn’t this show up when I search?”
She felt it in her body before she could name it:
“I’m doing everything right. Why does it feel like I’m starting over every time?”
That’s when she ran into the hidden problem in food content.
The Hidden Problem
Most food content doesn’t fail loudly. It fades quietly.
Creators are taught to optimize outputs:
better hooks
more video
more platforms
But very few are taught to build structure underneath the content they’re already making.
Nelly’s recipes weren’t invisible because they lacked soul. They were invisible because platforms couldn’t recognize them as part of something bigger.
Each recipe lived alone.
There were no clear connections.
No consistent signals.
No system helping her content travel.
The Technical Takeaway
Platforms don’t reward creativity alone.
They reward clarity.
When Nelly started looking at her content differently, not as individual videos, but as a connected body of work, things shifted.
She didn’t change her voice.
She didn’t abandon her heritage.
She didn’t post more.
She started adding structure:
naming techniques consistently
grouping recipes by method, not just vibe
thinking about where else a recipe could live after YouTube
That structure gave platforms context.
Context is what makes content findable.
The Mindset Shift
This is the shift at the heart of Create Once, Share Everywhere™:
Food content isn’t just something you publish.
It’s something you design.
Structure doesn’t erase tradition.
It preserves it.
For Nelly, structure became a way to:
honor her roots
make her work reusable
let her recipes travel further than a single feed
Try this (15 minutes)
As the year begins, skip resolutions.
Instead, answer these three questions about your content:
What will you keep doing from 2025?
(What’s already working?)What will you stop doing?
(What’s burning energy without return?)What will you start doing?
(What structure have you been avoiding?)
Write the answers down.
Structure starts with intention.
Where This Connects to the Bigger Picture
If this resonates, I go deeper on the technical side—metadata, structure, and how platforms actually process food content—over on the Blueberri Bytes.
The blog is the technical library.
Blueberri Pi is where we talk about what it means.
What’s Coming Next
I’m kicking off 2026 on the road:
CES in Las Vegas — Jan 4
Where food, tech, and future interfaces collide. Y’all know I’m a tech nerd so super excited to be hosting a panel with some amazing ladies doing cool things in food delivery!
Tastemaker Conference in LA — Jan 8
Speaking with creators who are already building what’s next. If you’ll be there, come by my session and say hi!!!
These rooms matter because they show where food content is headed, not just on blogs or social, but inside products, platforms, and kitchens we haven’t fully imagined yet.
I’ll be sharing what I see, hear, and question along the way.
Welcome back to Blueberri Pi.
Let’s build content that lasts.
Your friend in food,
