Foodies & Friends (F&F) is a social media platform. A closed community on Facebook, but equally active on Instagram. It was established on August 14, 2017, by Rana Khurram Ali, an Entrepreneur and a Finance & Management professional. The team members behind the success of Foodies & Friends are the founder and Senior Admin Khurram A. Khan, along with Co-Admins Asma Khurram, Rafia Rizwan, Sidrah Kazi, Nisa Anwer, Saryia Shariq and Sadia Kashif.
The purpose behind this initiative was to do some creative work especially to promote the talent of people and help them explore their skills, abilities and strengths and present them to the world. This was based on a pure objective to promote Pakistan’s food and culture and the hidden talent of Pakistani women and tell the community that work can be done without any greed or exploitation of others. A huge number of people have gathered and interacted virtually on a single platform started by the F&F team promoting healthy activities all over around, and giving people relief from their tiring, depressive work schedules.
Facebook group, its page and Instagram are the social media platforms where F&F have proved its success in such a short span of time by fascinating a huge amount of audience. It is a community that organically achieved an audience of almost 94000, compared to other Facebook platforms that rarely achieve an organic audience. Over 72% of its audience is aged between 18-34 years and includes the membership from three major cities Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad. Over 400 users generated posts can be seen on daily basis, and such posts garner around 5000 comments and 20000 reactions. Its average daily active users are around 50000. So, it is one of the largest and most active communities that created content around food on a single platform in the country.
In today’s era where everyone is so busy that one could hardly get time to plan for some refreshing activities, and almost all people are much into the race of achieving their goals that they have forgotten to relax. We direly need such platforms where people can interact for a positive purpose, promoting a healthy environment, encouraging and motivating people to identify and show up their strengths and then appreciating each other’s skills and abilities. Engaging in such competitions or activities arranged by F&F team gives a break to the people from their hectic routines.
F&F team has been so determined towards achieving the objectives that they put in all their efforts to come up with a story of huge success. They took all the initiatives according to their ideas and promoted their platform by arranging different activities and competitions that help them in achieving the fame they wanted. As a result of all this hard work, in the Second Food Excellence 2019 awards ceremony held on 19th of November 2019 at Sindh Governor House, F&F was among one the nominees for Best Social Media Platform in Food Category at the Pakistan level and won the award. It must be a really proud moment for the F&F team that in just 2 years span they were able to achieve the goal that they had been recognized as one of the leading social media platforms at the overall Pakistan level.
One of the programs started by F&F team was “Meet, Eat and Write” (MEW) in Lahore which resulted in great success. Afterwards they expanded it further to other cities, Karachi and Islamabad. For this program, they collaborated with International Institutes mainly related to food and culture in focused countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Lebanon and France. Through this program, F&F team would get a certain budget on a monthly basis which they have to spend on any food or cultural activity and write reviews about it and send to them.
Moreover, a Grand Family Event Shudh Desi Fala & Tambola Night was arranged by Foodies and Friends on a Saturday night at Marina farmhouse. The objective behind this event was to bring together all the food lovers providing them with a platform to experience the best food in town. Different competitions and activities were held in order to make the night more interesting and exciting for the visitors. Numerous activities were a part of the event like a Dhol Performance, Singing performance. The event was further followed by an appetizing dinner. Then Tambola competition took place which was highly relished by the participants. There was a range of various prizes allotted to the winners of the night to cherish their victory, which included Wireless speakers, ear pods, smart watches air fryers. In the events or competitions arranged by F&F, every time the prizes are arranged for the winners that even had LEDs, Air conditioners, Refrigerators and other high-end Kitchen appliances.
This is not all, Foodies & Friends Family bears responsibility not only for the economic consequences of their actions but also for the social and environmental consequences. They have established various food camps for the purpose of providing a neat and clean diet to the poor. The F&F team is also involved in the distribution of groceries to the needy. They are also so eager to support any type of new startup that they encourage them by publicizing their abilities and assisting them in their growth.
