Ifreet Taheea: Not just another girl who loves to eat
As of today, she has amassed more than 26,000 followers on Instagram. She is the only blogger who has worked and collaborated with every single five-star restaurant in Dhaka
It is always a gratifying feeling when your work aligns with your passion. Especially, when your passion stems from your love for food.
For Ifreet Taheea, now an established food blogger in the niche 'culinary content creation community' of Dhaka, it was a piece of Korean fried chicken that lit up her tastebuds enough to instigate a fascination that would later, over the course of time, transform into a food blogging page which 26,000 followers on Instagram know as 'iffybiffys.'
"Back in 2011-12, there wasn't much of a social scene in Chattogram. We [Taheea and her friends] used to hang out at this small chicken shack shop called DFC [Dorothy Fried Chicken]. To this day, they have only two main items on their menu and it's the same two people who have been working there for the past three decades. You could say that DFC was my first taste of international cuisine," said Taheea.
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Whilst DFC was the root of Taheea's inquisitiveness about food, it wasn't until she moved to the United States in 2014 for a year-long exchange programme that the ball began to roll for her food blogging career.
"It was during my stay in the US when I had a wider exposure and a proper introduction to food. My host family was based in a suburban area called New Hampshire. My host mom noticed how much I was into cooking and baking and told me to try different recipes at home. She was a photographer and said she'll click pictures of the food and I could set up a blog," said Taheea.
Taheea then focused on learning how to cook better and learnt a lot of recipes. That's when she started her blogs. She used to write the recipes of the dishes and post them online along with the photos captured by her host mother.
"Going abroad let me try out a lot of ingredients which would've been inaccessible to me in Chattogram. For example, even something simple as heavy cream was nowhere to be found back in the day. And if you did find any, they were very, very expensive. I got access to such products very easily overseas and that allowed me to be more adventurous with recipes and explore deeper into different kinds of food," she said.
For all content creators, there are certain phases where their social media pages and channels gain extreme popularity for specific content and they end up on everybody's feed.
For Taheea, that happened in 2018 when she was an undergraduate student at North South University.
"My friends and I always used to try out nearby eateries and post pictures of the food we tried on my page. That's when Facebook and Instagram algorithms played their magic. My page and posts used to pop up on everybody's timeline and my posts started gaining engagement. People were commenting and inquiring about the food that I was trying out.
Within a year, my followers grew from a couple of hundred to 3,000," added Taheea.
One other event that brought Taheea and a few other food bloggers/vloggers fame was when a national daily newspaper featured a meetup of 16 food content creators back in 2017.
After that, a lot of restaurants started reaching out to Taheea (and also others) for reviewing or promoting their brands. According to Taheea, "Things took a complete turn after that article was published."
As of today, she has amassed more than 26,000 followers on Instagram. She is the only blogger who has worked and collaborated with every single five-star restaurant in Dhaka.
She has also worked with two international brands - Blendjet from the US and Right To Protein from India. Blendjet sells portable blenders and Right To Protein is an awareness programme focused on protein enriched diet and they have been planning to enter the Bangladeshi market.
Currently, Taheea is venturing into other social media platforms. She has decided to explore the world of TikTok.
"For the longest time, I thought TikTok was a bit too fast-paced for my liking. That was before one video of mine went viral. It's funny because it was a simple video of me opening a mussel at the Fish n Co launching ceremony. I went to bed after posting it and woke up only to discover that the clip had generated more than a million views overnight.
Every day I'm learning something new about TikTok," she concluded.
