How AndyCooks Became the Biggest Cooking Channel

My job is pretty much entirely just YouTube ideation scripts. Does that influence which videos get placed where? There's certain things that happen that are a little bit more emotional than others, so of course you want to keep those in. What happens if you're halfway through a video and then the food doesn't turn out the way you expect it? I think it's the thing that subconsciously affects the viewer the most. And Caleb, on the producer for the Andy Cooks YouTube channel, the biggest food YouTube channel in Australia, with 6.2 million subscribers. Okay, Caleb Cooking is a fantastic niche to work in because everyone loves good food, but there's so much competition out there. So my question is, what are the right ingredients that make Andy Cooks stand out from all the other chefs on the internet? I think it's just his experience. He has actually been a chef for 25 years professionally. So he knows his stuff, he knows what he's talking about. When he started during COVID, he's doing three short today. And that was a perfect time, right? Everyone's at home. They wanted to learn how to cook, so it just kind of like really worked well. That's also just making sure that we have a really well-produced, very well-edited, smooth sort of short. Shorts can often be a bit cutty, a bit jumpy, but there's such a thing as smooth editing that's still fast paced, you know? So real-world experience, how does that translate to a video? Like his reputation has been built on this website and his recipes, and people can trust the recipes. They know that when they make an Andy Cooks recipe, it's actually going to deliver. You know, it's going to taste good. Whereas from personal experience, I've definitely tried some recipes that haven't quite worked out with the shorts. And then I think it's just sometimes occasionally we'll be doing a short that just has some sort of like inside a knowledge of something that people may not have not heard before that pulls from his experience. And then in terms of consistency, what does that mean today in the year 2026? The whenever somebody comes across an Andy Cooks short, they know exactly what they're going to get. We like to think of it as a show in itself. Karim, who does subway takes, speaks about this really well, about how he's like created a show for social media, you know what I mean? I know that when I'm scrolling, I'll come across a content creator or something like that, and just because it's them, and because I know I like their show, I stick around and I watch. So having content that is instantly recognizable always delivers in some way, whether it's like a tip or a great recipe, I think it's just having that sort of, not trying to reinvent a wheel all of the time. I thought by consistency, I thought you were going to talk about upload cadence, but you talked about consistency within the style of the show. I think for 2026, I think it's style within the show. When we first started, it was 100% posting as much as possible. So for the first three months of Andy Cooks, he was posting three times a day, and then for two years after that, it was real every single day. We ended up dropping that back down a little bit just because of workload. Like, you know, there's a lot that we're posting. Two YouTube videos a week and five shorts a week at this point with one editor, one cameraman. So in terms of consistency, I want to list a few characteristics, and I want you to describe what that means for Andy across all channels. In terms of shorts, how are you consistent with the hooks or the first second of your video? I'm sure you've seen the "Hey babe" series. "Hey babe, what do you want for breakfast?" Ooh, I want an egg bag and cheese. Yes, of course. Which is sort of what, like, you know, if nobody thought of Andy, if I say he's the "Hey babe" guy, they know who he is. And that worked really well for us in terms of like, you see the "Hey babe", you instantly know what this is about, you know, what show you're about to watch. That has fizzled out with sort of phasing it out. It's not doing so well. It's also just getting a bit boring internally. But I guess we're always trying to find a hook that we can repeat as much as possible. For instance, we had a hook for a little while that has had some decent success of, like, one pot one spoon dinner in 30 minutes. Just a quick easy meal with little dishes. We've done, like, chef snacks where it's just something random that he'll do, like, microwaves and cheese with some gochujang on it. Very, very easy sort of stoner food type vibe, which does well. Oftentimes, a good hook for us will just be, like, walking in with a big, impressive slab of meat. People like to see that. Dropping that on the bench, you know? People like, "Oh, Dan, I haven't seen anything like that before." So are you generating hooks internally with the team thinking, "Oh, maybe this introductory line will be really clever." And then you put it out and you see, and it says, "Oh, yeah, okay, it worked kind of well or it didn't work at all." And then you either bin it or promote it to another video? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Andy loves to say all the time, fail fast. And because we are so consistent with, you know, release schedule, we are, our strategy is much more about volume, I'd say, which means that we can just get on to the next one. How are you consistent with the recipe choices? That's an Andy question, honestly. An interesting thing about me is before starting here, I was never really into food. I didn't know who Andy was. Very limited cooking ability. Maybe some two minute noodles would be about as far as I'd go. So obviously I've been working here for three years and food's a big part of my life. I love cooking now. I've learned plenty. Getting to watch cooking tutorials for a living. How are you consistent with the sound, like the sizzle of a steak or the chopping or the pan hitting the stove? Honestly, I think that comes a lot going to the editing. What might be interesting is we just use the lapel mic that Andy has on. So we do have other mics that are like a directional mic, but I've found that just using a lapel keeps it a bit more steady across the thing. And then it's just all the little tricks in editing, like never cutting off a sound. You know, like if a pot drops, you let that audio play out through the next three clips if it needs to, making sure that everything's fading across, everything feels very smooth, and you're never having any hard cuts in the audio, I think is like a big thing that helps you have a faster pace visually. There's also like a visual consistency. There's like a nice visual vibe to everything. How are you consistent about that? How are you thoughtful about that? It's pretty simple. We just have a camera that is centered on what he's doing, facing straight at him, especially when we're showing something. We're explaining a process and that sort of thing. It's good to be in a studio where we can just like have everything set. We're ready to go every day. You can just press record. How are you consistent about whether the audience needs to learn something? I feel like you could cut most of our content into two categories of these sort of explainer videos and then just like flat recipe videos. I think when we started out just recipe videos, well, what did really, really well. And again, I feel like my gut feeling is that that just had a lot to do with COVID. A lot of people were cooking, which is why we had such good success earlier on. But now the informational stuff, we're sort of trying to lean into that a little bit more because I do think it sticks. The things that do well on Instagram and TikTok are the things that are a bit more shareable. So like if Andy calls out someone for making a mistake, he's like, "Don't do this." Or else, you know, you're ruined in your dish. And people are more likely to send that to their friends saying like, "See, I told you." Now, you always do this. You always make this mistake. You know, there's a bit more conversation piece that you can have. Like, it's a unit of conversation. Whereas on YouTube shorts, people are much less likely to share a YouTube short with their friend, I think. Obviously you can, but it's just less in the UI itself. So I think that that's a lot more about the comment section. Do those two discrepancies across platforms? Or do you have separate edits for both of them? We do not. And that's purely like a workload thing. We're just posting the same short across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, Facebook as well. I would say that for our shorts, our primary focus is Instagram. So that's sort of like where we're thinking about things the most. I feel like that's mostly where our audience is based. So for context, our audience is mostly men 25 to 35. And I feel like they're either on YouTube shorts or Instagram. Instagram is the one I think where people are saving recipes a little bit more. It's sending them to their partners or friends or whatever. So it'd be great to get to a point where we can create different content for different platforms because they do think that's the way to go. Oh, interesting. What do you think? Having content for Instagram and TikTok that's very shareable and create a conversation between you and your friends is like the most important thing for those platforms. And then I think for YouTube, what you want to try and create is a conversation, the comment section. So people, hard opinions, you know what I mean? Controversial opinions, those sort of thing. How important is it that Andy or somebody tastes the food? That's an interesting one. I think it's very important. I think that half of what you get out of a cooking show is seeing the person's reaction to the food they've tasted. If they taste it and make it like a funny face and you're probably not going to like make the recipe. But we get a lot of people who complain about food mouth sounds and that sort of thing. So it's an interesting one. Some people love to hear the crunch. They love to hear the sound of the noodles or whatever. But then other people hate it. So I'm just going to lean with it's important. Like I think that that's my take. How important is the plated shot? I think that's very important. It's what you're trying to sell. We usually put it at the front of our video so that people know what they're going to get out of watching the video. One thing we also think about a lot is, again, particularly for Instagram, is our cover photos. They're always taken by Ben, who's a photographer. They're like very nice photos that are usually used on the website for our recipes. A lot of people will scroll through a profile, just to find a dish that they want to cook. And if you have these nice recipe photos, they're much more likely to choose one. You know what I mean? I used to work in television commercials. And sometimes we would do food products. And there would be a specific food designer who would come in with little tiny tongs. And you ever do that kind of stuff, too? We always think of lettuce and roading. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Making sure things are hot and steaming. Sometimes we're trying to manufacture a little bit of a drip. So all of that, all of those considerations in those subtle opinions and preferences, that's what makes up an Andy Cook's video compared to any other competitor out there. I think so, yeah. I think it's pretty important to us that we are making videos that we like, that we enjoy watching, enjoy making, and that feel very much us, rather than going as hard as we can on specific trends or strategies for optimal growth, if that makes sense. You're not compromising on your sanity, I suppose. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. How did you get connected with Andy in the first place? It was just a recommendation from a friend of mine who had worked with a few times. He'd been doing a little bit of work with Andy like just helping out with some shoots on the side, a bit of freelance work. And then when they were looking for a full-time editor, he thought of me recommended. me had a little chat with Andy in his living room. He's like, "Yes, we jump on, so we've been going ever since." - You must have been like one of the first hires, if not the first hire. - When Andy first started, it was just him. He had never edited, he'd never used cameras or anything like that. He got straight into it and just tried to figure it out as he went, did a great job. But then a friend of his, who was a photographer and knew a thing or two about cameras, he pulled on. So that was Mitch. He became a character known as Basic Mitch, and we love Basic Mitch. He hasn't been working with us for about, well, since we moved down to Sydney, so I'd say he was the first hire. It's been a fun time ever since I started and still to this day, any edit that goes through and people lack it. They'll say, "Wow, Mitch, you killed the editing on this." And I'm like, "Mitch has an editing of video in three years." Very like, "That's fine, I can be Mitch." - You were an editor, but then you transitioned into a producer semi-recently. - Yeah, yeah, no exactly. So September last year, I got into producing as someone who just has been around the channel for a long time and understands Andy pretty well. We have good bantering, that sort of thing. It's sort of made sense for me to get into that role. - Wait, why did it make sense? This is what I'm curious about. Why did it make sense? - I think for a role like a producer, there needs to be very easy communication and like, understanding between the talent and the producer. Like, it's very, very collaborative. And so I think to have someone come in who, you know, there's already that relationship there, there's already, I've watched literally hundreds and hundreds or made, edited hundreds and hundreds of shorts and YouTube videos for him. Like, I have a very deep understanding of how he works and what he likes to say and how he speaks and all of these sorts of things. So, being on set and just hanging out with people that you know and trust is gonna make for a much better video because you're comfortable on camera. - Where does your team spend more energy and time than most people would expect? - It might be obvious or it might not be. The kitchen is obviously an interesting part of our job. When I'm making a video, well, you know, writing up a video idea, coming up with the script and the short list and the schedule for filming and everything. So much of that is subject to cook times and when things can be ready by, you know, we'll put something in the oven and it has to sit there for three hours. We can sometimes have things prepared earlier, you know, we can do it that way or we can put something in the oven and then film another portion of the video in the time that we have where we're cooking. I have to think a lot about the kitchen side of things when I'm putting together a short list which is interesting. - I would have never thought about it, but it makes so much sense. What happens if you're halfway through a video and then the food doesn't turn out the way you expected? - One thing that's important to us, I think, is like trying to leave that in. So he did a pay a video recently, which is a feloncian dish, which is quite tricky to get right, especially if it's your first time and Andy hasn't made many of those. It's very easy to burn it and he did burn it a little bit in the video, but he was it, you know, we wanted to turn that into a bit of a story moment where he's like, "Oh, I try my best, didn't quite get there." And that's okay because I think it's important for home cooks to realize that even really good cooks can stuff up sometimes and you should feel okay about making mistakes in the kitchen, you know, so. - Okay, I want to talk about one video in particular and this is one where Andy did kind of like a two-day stodge at Attica. You mentioned that that filming session left you with 24 hours of raw footage, basically four terabytes of media. How do you piece together what is the final video? - That's kind of my favorite thing about editing. I guess I just start with watching it all. Like you kind of just do have to watch it all scrub through. Obviously there's pitch you can skip, so it's not like I sat there for 24 hours, but I'll, you know, I think just absorbing all of the content and making notes, so many notes of just any little thing that maybe happened and then rereading those notes away from my computer as well, just so that I'm fully like in the head space of the video and you sort of pie together the story beats that you notice. Anything with stakes, you know, it's just all of these classic storytelling things that you want to let focus on. - What's the deliverables for a V1 of something of that scale? - With that project in particular, I got it pretty close for V1. We would leave things like color and music out 'cause those are more so finishing touches, although I do love editing with music, so oftentimes I would pull in a track to inspire a section of the edit. But generally it's mostly just about what the content is and whether the storyline makes sense and then all of the little things like putting little edit stings and beats in there, adding music, adding color, that's all something that happens later once the actual meat and potatoes of the video is locked in. With that project in particular, like it was just me editing it, so I took it pretty much all of the way before V1. It was definitely a bigger video that took a lot more time than our usual YouTube videos, which for context, you know, a standard, we call them stand-in stars, YouTube video and maybe take me like a day to end a half to edit one of those with like maybe two, three hours of footage, something like this, it took two weeks of long hours, so. - Yeah, I used to be a video editor myself and I remember just getting a bunch of footage dumped on my plate and it was like, okay, this is due on, you know, in a week and a half or two weeks, good luck and then you're like, oh god, what am I gonna do? For me, V1 was often just like trying to get the story right and I didn't want to put too much energy into like finessing the edits and everything like that because there's a decent chance that something that you thought was gonna work was not gonna work and it gets dropped off. So you want to be conscious of not spending too much time on that and then for V2, if there was ever like graphics or animations or text even, you know, you get a little bit more polished with the music. I found, I actually liked doing the music early 'cause it helped influence the vibe of the scene and you know, you could kind of have this ebb and flow between music that made you feel a certain way and music that, you know, accelerated or decelerated. But what I learned was you don't really like finesse the music until very, very much at the end 'cause sometimes you want to take the end of a track and stitch it in and have a nice seamless flow. Too many times I tried to like get the music perfect and then someone would ask for a new shot included in the scene or like take it away from the scene or change the duration of the track. - Yeah, back when I worked in a more commercial setting, the amount of times I would do a whole TVC and then the client like, you know, would eventually make it up to higher ups and they're like, oh, can we change this song? - Yeah, it's a foundational thing of the whole video. That's just true. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an interesting one for me because like music 100% motivates pacing and energy and all those sorts of things. When I'm editing something like the Attica video, I'm very interested in how it feels without the music influencing it because I do kind of think that if something's edited well enough or let the story is right enough, you should still feel moved by that story or you should still get what the story's trying to say. And then the music is just going to enhance that rather than relying too much on the music. So I don't know, both ways work. I think for something like Attica fell, it was a bit more of a conscious decision to not be thinking about the music so much. But again, there were scenes where it's like, no, I want this to be driving and I want this to be high energy. So I'm going to put some music in here now while I'm editing this section just to get that rolling, you know? - I think the biggest flex as an editor is to be able to make someone feel something without having music as like a supporting piece of the pie. Doesn't always work out, but when it does, it's so good. - Not. - Yeah. - No, I agree. - How do you strike a balance either as an editor or a producer between making stuff that feels good, telling a good story, you know, staying true to who Andy is and to who the team is versus this retention game that's looming over us all the time? - That's the biggest question, isn't it? I think particularly when I started out doing this producer role, I was very excited to be making videos that I loved and was proud of and that these were going to be like, just the quality is going to be so good that everyone's going to come watch it. But that is obviously not the case with the amount of content that is on YouTube and the amount that you need to, to grab people's attention with a thumbnail and a title. Retention is something I think we do pretty well on, honestly. I'm quite happy with our retention. I think once people start watching a video, they're happy with what they get. For me, it's more the title packaging and creating like a little, little question for the viewer that's exciting to, you know, that makes them want to click and makes them want to figure something out. That's I think the challenging part for me right now. - Where did the packaging for this video come in in the pipeline? Is this something that you thought of up front and then you found Attica? Or was the opportunity presented and then you retroactively tried to fit it? - It was retroactive. The way that we were operating at that time was very much like thumbnail was a lot later in the process which I think is not the play, you know, when we're making YouTube videos. Thumbnails need to come a lot earlier. But yeah, at that time, it was more just a delay. And he has a relationship with Ben Shury, the chef there is an opportunity to cook for 48 hours. So he does it and then we end up with this piece of content. And I mean, the thumbnail is nothing revolutionary. It's very much just exactly what the video is. So there's a sense of rawness to it, I suppose. - Yeah, and it's an interesting one because I think all of the content that I watch on YouTube and what I enjoy is very much that sort of aesthetic, simple, very exactly what it is. A nice looking image is the thumbnail with a little bit of text but it's not the thing that drives clicks as hard as some more polished thumbnails that are out there. - So on our show, we pre-interview all of our guests just to kind of see what interests them, what they think about the creator economy. And one thing really stood out to me. You said that the second screen is real. More people are listening, just listening than you think. Can you tell me more about that? - I think this is an interesting one because obviously we can't really get better on this. Like you can't see this in analytics. So it is very much a hunch. I know from personal experience, just seeing how my friends engage with media and that sort of thing, if they're watching a YouTube video, they always have their phone up. They're always scrolling, they're always messaging, they're always doing other things. And so like the TV is definitely a second screen and then with computers as well. Like when people are watching stuff, it's so often just in a little window in the corner while they do their work or they're working from home. So they have it on their second monitor, you know? I think it's maybe a little bit more common than people realize. I feel like that would obviously change a lot, depending on the niche. I was watching a YouTube video. And one of the things he asked was some people to leave a comment if they were just listening to the video. And there was a lot of comments. It was like far more than you'd expect. To be fair, this video, was much more of like a video essay kind of thing, which is a lot better for second screening or having in your pocket when you're walking or whatever. You hear Netflix talking about a lot where they're just like putting in so much exposition into their TV shows because they're aware that people aren't paying attention to the video. - Is this something you're considerate of as well? - It's something I'd like to be more considerate of in our videos, I think audio often gets a bit left behind, and I'm not saying that we had it down to a science who figured it out, but I think it's the thing that subconsciously affects the viewer the most. Audio has a major, major role, and if people aren't actively paying attention to the screen, which like, let's be honest, I don't think many people are, the audio is gonna be like the major driver there. Whenever we have a graphic or an animation, like I think having these in the video draws people's attention back to the screen because we have a little audio beat when that animation happens. I think you hear a little sounding like, "Oh, what's happening on the screen?" And that'll pull people's attention back into the video. - Oh, interesting, right, okay. So I work for a handful of different people, and sometimes they film themselves. And I think a simple mistake is people spent too much time perfecting the visuals. Like it's really important to have nice lighting and to have a nice scene and everything like that. I've sat through it a few times where people have spent 15 minutes rotating a potted plant so that it looks perfect. When in reality, what's much more important is like the quality of the audio. Like you wanna make sure you have really crisp audio, you want it to be clear not to echoey in the room, that kind of thing. I learned that really early in film school, they were like, "You think videos important, you think we're a video language, but we're actually an audio language, it's much more important to get it right, because people will leave if they can't hear you or understand you, or if the audio quality's bad, but people can tolerate kind of imperfect video." - Absolutely. I think it's how we experience most things is like audio first. We always hear something and then we look, you know? So it's just pretty natural that we would consume content that way. - Whenever I'm reviewing a video, I feel like I'm doing a good job if I'm being extra aware, if I feel the urge to go for my phone. - Yeah. - Because the second screen thing, it does divert your attention, right? So as soon as I'm watching, I'm like, "Oh, I could look at my phone." That's a moment where it's like, "Okay, leave a note." - You got a cut. - Yeah, something needs to change, right? - Yeah, it's interesting how that impulse of picking out the phone is just something that we have now, and it's helpful in it as a tool for that reviewing retention. - Do you ever review in person with Andy or with someone from your team? - So we will work here in the same office, in the same building, which I really appreciate. I'm sure everyone knows about the effect as an editor, as soon as someone's watching over your shoulder, you notice so much more. So that's what I was going to say. - Yeah, absolutely. - Reviewing with someone is the best thing, because it's never the person over the shoulder who's noticing the staff is the editor, who's seen it a million times, who starts thinking about it from a different perspective. - Caleb, I've got one last question for you. It's the question that I ask everybody who comes on the show, and that is, who is a creator that's on your radar right now? That's worthy of a shout out. And there's this YouTuber who's making really cool videos that are quite like a flitch. Takes him a while to build his videos, very sporadic posting schedule, but he does an amazing job of just making little like, little movies for YouTube. I just really appreciate that kind of YouTube, where it does feel like someone has put in a lot of effort to just finesse an entire video. The first video that caught my attention was speedrunning the flute, where he essentially has never played the flute before. He just picks it up, who's like, I'm going to figure this out, and then makes a video of the process, and it took him a while, but cut down into a video, it's a fun story. And then he did a similar thing with skateboarding, where he was like, I always wanted to know how to skateboard. I've never been able to. So he made a movie about it. You know, that sort of project that obviously takes like eight months or something to film that entire learning experience, but yeah, he does such a good job of pulling that together into a fun little inspirational story. Gawks, we love Gawks, don't we? - Of course. - Pretty incredible what he's doing. - The stuff where he takes like a projector and puts it on his wall and then he films it and he's so clever, so creative. - Mixed media is one of my favorite things I think. When that's done right, I really love that style. We're talking a lot about how we can bring that into our content, but it's obviously a bit more effort. - We'll keep our eye out for it. Hopefully it makes it in soon. - Yeah, that's it. - Thank you so much for watching or listening to the show. If you're new here, please consider subscribing, even leave a comment. If you're listening on the audio platforms, please leave us a review. For some reason, I'm really fixated on audio reviews right now. If you're a producer with over a million subscribers and you want to come be on the show, please reach out. We would love to hear from you. There's a new episode every Thursday, so thank you for being here and we'll see you next week.