101 Studios Launching Yes Chef Studios In Partnership With ‘Jack’s Dining Room’ Creators (Exclusive)

David Glasser’s 101 Studios is getting into the food content business.

The Yellowstone and Tulsa King studio is launching a new venture called Yes Chef Studios with Yes Chef Group, which was founded by Jack Goldburg and Liam Henning. Goldburg is the face of Jack’s Dining Room, a popular food and travel program that counts more than a million YouTube subscribers, and more than three million Instagram followers.

101 is investing $25 million in the venture, which will create longform scripted and unscripted programming that touches on food, culture, travel and hospitality. It will also seek to develop a next generation of food content creators.

“We’re in the scripted TV space, we’re in the feature scripted space, and we do unscripted. We do quite a bit of it, but we haven’t cracked the food space,” Glasser tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “I’ve been looking to figure out who that next [Anthony] Bourdain is. We’ve looked at a ton of different stuff, and Jack just really steps up to all of those things. He’s not a a one hit wonder, one and done, get some subscribers and go. He’s building a very loyal fan base, but he is also creating original content and original stories for for his audience. And so the question is, how do you take a guy like him and put it together?”

Jack’s Dining Room sees Goldburg traveling the world to try unique foods, from the casual to the luxurious, often meeting locals along the way. The creator says that he thinks the cash, as well as 101’s production expertise and Hollywood relationships, can help the studio become the next big food brand.

“To really stand out and to really be top of the game is challenging in today’s world. I think we are in a world where everyone has access to everything, and there’s so much,” says Goldburg. “With 101 putting in the money behind it to really help us flex our muscles, and them bringing ammunition and what they’re best at with producing incredible shows and the directing power, and then us in the food space with curating food content, curating other people, curating shows and concepts and other creators. I just think you pair that together; it’s going to be game over.”

Glasser and Goldburg say that they already have some concepts in the works, with plans to ultimately sell those projects to major streaming platforms or TV networks, while also continuing to invest in YouTube and social content, particularly with new creators.

“He’s had the streamers coming to him. He wants to be an owner in that,” Glasser says. “We are in the studio economics business at 101. We are a studio, that’s what we do in the TV shows that we do. We also see teaming him up with other partners in our world and bringing other content creators, whether unscripted or unscripted, together with him.”

“We have a ton of really awesome scripted concepts that we’re coming out with that have food as kind of this core theme,” Goldburg adds, noting the success of the FX series The Bear.

Glasser says that he was introduced to Jack’s Dining Room by his son Ryan Glasser, who works in 101’s brands division. “Ryan was like, you’ve got to pay attention to this guy,” Glasser recalls. They connected and struck up a conversation, including with Yes Chef’s CEO Jake Nussbaum and co-founder Liam Henning. They “went down the rabbit hole,” Glasser says, and came away with 12-14 ideas, which got them excited about the studio concept.

“Some that he’s in, some that he wants to produce, and then the idea is to expand the business even to who are the other Jacks that are out there? And start to bring them up,” Glasser says.

Indeed, developing this next generation of food talent seems to be a key piece of the Yes Chef Studios strategy.

“I have so many amazing stories to tell, but there are also so many stories I want to tell, not just through my voice, but with other people and other lenses,” says Goldburg, noting the impact food media had on him when he was younger. “I grew up on the Food Network. I grew up with go watching Bourdain and [Andrew] Zimmern and Bobby Flay.”

And for 101, it is also a test of a concept. The studio has deals with the likes of Taylor Sheridan and George Clooney’s Smokehouse, but Jack’s Dining Room could be a template for how 101 thinks of other creator-led deals, particularly in an era when the likes of Netflix and Disney+ are hungry fot that talent.

“I think there’s a lot of incredible short form content players who are thinking about ‘how do I cross over?'” he says. “So they come up with one idea, they go into a Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, they go into development. Maybe the project goes somewhere. We want to be the opposite. We want to be the the factory that brings them in, utilizing the wicked smart team that we have at 101, with Jack and his team, and we’re bringing in other groups. It could be in any space: Food, culture, lifestyle, beauty, fashion, whatever it is, and figure out how to build a platform by which we can cross them over into long form content, and really spending the time before they go out and pitch one idea and sell their first idea.”