Dinner with Jon

Jon May - TikTok Chef
Business Management/Marketing, Class of 2014 

What made you decide to come to Swansea University? 

Every year my school did a trip to Swansea Uni after the students had broken up. We used to stay in the Hendrefoilan student village as part of a week-long school trip effectively in sixth form, and I really loved it. I applied to Swansea off the back of that. The trip got students to think about university life, experience some activities and cook for yourself a bit. One of the students did burn themselves cooking pasta though.  

What were your go-to places for food and drinks when you were at Swansea?  

It changed a lot when I was there. They changed the front of Fulton House, Costcutter came in, and then they refurbished JC's, and they had loads of new menus and different things on. There was also Pub on the Pond. That was good. I never did ride the pedalo, although I did see other people doing it. But I didn't know whether that was a good idea or not. 

We went into the Mumbles a few times, Verdi's was always a good one. Now they’ve redeveloped the whole Mumbles area, and there's lots of new places that weren't there when I was a student. But on campus it was very much JC’s. 

Is there a meal that you remember fondly from your time at Uni? 

The Grape and Olive, which was a restaurant on the 27th floor of the Meridian Tower was great. They did a good surf and turf there, and when it was a nice day, you could see across the whole bay.  If it was cloudy, you couldn’t see anything outside. Campus wise, it’s JC’s. They redid the kitchen when I was there and brought out burgers and chips. Burger and chips were very much a staple in the afternoon from JC’s. 

We know you’ve started a TikTok page, but what’s your career been like since leaving Swansea Uni? 

At Swansea I was part of the Waterfront student newspaper. I was very involved in student media, and then my career immediately after graduation was working in student media at other universities. Training students at Sheffield University, Royal Holloway, and the University of Westminster Students Union. That was my first bit of career after leaving university, and then because I studied marketing, I went into email marketing working for the RAC and a number of different smaller companies and then branching even further into email marketing into CRM on the more technical side. That's my job now, as the head of marketing operations for a company called Retail Excellence. They do software for grocery companies predicting how much inventory they'll need. The biggest companies we work for are M&S Foods, WHSmith and Morrison's. We do Aldi and Lidl on the European continent, but not in the UK just yet. You never really know when you graduate, what you're going to do. I took a few different turns. But yeah, I've now gone into marketing operations on the technical side of marketing. And that's where my career has ended up. 

What inspired you to start sharing food and lifestyle content on TikTok? 

It was March 2021 during lockdown. You couldn't have people over for dinner, and since I had more time on my hands, I thought I would learn how to cook, and my friend suggested, ‘Oh, why don't you post it on TikTok?’ It wasn't really meant as anything more than a video diary for me to make sure I didn't have a takeaway that night. In lockdown I suddenly found I didn't pay for any commuting. I didn't pay for lunches at work, so I suddenly had a lot more money as I wasn't spending, and I was like, ‘Oh, I'll just get takeaways, and I'll just, you know, have a nice time’.

That was fine, but it was not particularly great on my waistline, so I decided I should probably learn how to cook rather than just assembling food from an oven. So, I was trying to teach myself and basically just put it on social media as a bit of a fun for friends and family. And then lockdown eased. There was a lot of lockdown-specific content at the time that didn’t perform very well, and I assumed people wouldn’t really be interested in that kind of content once lockdown ended. But they were, the audience kept growing even after restrictions lifted. Now, instead of just being lockdown-focused, it’s become more about connecting with people who feel isolated or just want a friendly presence. It’s really taken off in that way. 

Is there a dish that you've never posted but love making? 

Oh, that's a good question. I don't think so. I try and post most things I do, just because all the social media engines are content machines. You’ve got to feed the machine. So, I'd probably say, no, because whatever I make, I tend to post one way or another. 

What's your favourite dish to make? 

I've got a cookbook coming out in a couple of months. So, I have a list of all the things that are in it. They're all my favourites.I'm going to say the treats are the Mac and Cheese, because that always does very well on social media. Mac and cheese is a food everyone can appreciate, and Chorizo. For some reason, anytime I add Chorizo to a dish, it does really well on social media.  

Did you expect your TikTok to take off in the way it did? 

No, never. I didn't really understand that people would enjoy the content as much as some people really do. The plan was to send it to my friends and family. But then the first few videos were seen by a couple of hundred people.  Then, the tenth video I did was a pulled chicken burger, and instead of getting a couple of hundred views, it got 10,000 views. Then every video I did after that, more and more people started watching. More and more people were following it, and I suddenly went from having 50 followers to hundreds, to a thousand, to 10,000, to 100,000. This was something I didn't even envisage.  

Do you find that your understanding of marketing from studying and working helps with your content? 

Yes, social media marketing is always evolving. It seems to change every couple of months. But at its core, it's still about identifying a need and finding a way to meet it. With my content, I try to carve out a space that isn’t overly political or commercial. It’s more like a quiet moment in the middle of a busy social feed, somewhere people can pause and just breathe. It was the kind of content I felt was missing, so I decided to create it myself. 

Do you have any standout moments or achievements that you're proud of? 

Yeah, there's TikTok meetups with loads of different creators. There are also people that you see on screen, and they've got tens of millions of followers, and you meet them in real life, and they're just, not different. But you imagine them differently. What people always say to me is, ‘Oh, gosh! You're a lot taller than I thought you were’, because obviously on a screen, you can't see a 6-foot 3 person. Davina McCall mentioned me on her podcast. Dawn French and Sarah Millican started following me. I got loads of messages after Lewis Capaldi followed me, saying, ‘Can you message Lewis Capaldi and tell him this and that’ and I was like, ‘he doesn't even follow me’. Then I checked, and I said, ‘Oh, God! That's the real Lewis Capaldi’. He only follows 200 people, and I'm one of them. I've never messaged him or Dawn French or anyone. It was quite surreal when I realised that these people who are household names, really like just watching me cook dinner.

If you could cook for any one celebrity, who would it be. 

Taylor Swift. I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Her favourite dish is chicken tenders, and I am tempted at some point to try and recreate Taylor's perfect dish. I’m not sure I should try though, because with Taylor Swift fans it can go one of two ways. It can go very well, and everyone's positive, or people can absolutely slate you and I try to steer away from the controversy.  

How many times a week do you film a video? 

I try to go for about three a week. For two of them I'll either have something very quick or something that's not particularly too involved. It might just be a pizza. I'm trying to scale up ever so slightly at the minute, because I've got a cookbook to sell, so I'm trying to do four or five videos per week and then try to interspace it with different types of content. I did a “day in the life” video just before Christmas. It did 20 times better than some of the dinner videos, because it's just different. People are curious about who you are and what happens behind the scenes.  

What advice would you give to anyone who aspires to become a content Creator? 

I think the most important thing is to work out who you want to make content for. That’s the audience you’ll resonate with the most. For me, I started creating the kind of content I personally wanted to see more of and now, interestingly, about two-thirds of my audience are men aged 20 to 35. If you target your content properly, you can do well. I think a lot of people try to make content for everyone, but when you do that, it doesn’t truly connect with anyone. You’re competing in a crowded social media market for attention, and the content must resonate with someone even if it doesn’t resonate with everyone. I do get messages from people saying, ‘I hate this,’ and I’m like, that’s fine! You don’t have to like it. I know I can’t appeal to everyone, but I focus on making content that works for a specific group and that’s where success comes from. The bigger the niche audience, the more potential there is to grow. But I’ve seen people be successful by focusing tightly like first-time mums, or people on fitness journeys. If you narrow your focus, you make it much easier for people to connect. What often doesn’t work is trying to do a bit of everything like cooking, gym, travel, lifestyle. Some people might love the travel content but aren’t interested in the rest, so they won’t stick around. That’s why my advice would be: pick a niche, stick to it, and build from there. 

What is one of the biggest challenges you have faced? 

One of the biggest challenges is dealing with negative comments. Every content creator gets them, but learning not to take them personally can be hard especially at the beginning. When I first started out, I’d get comments that weren’t very nice, and they would really upset me. Over time though, I’ve developed a bit of a thicker skin. It’s not ideal, and in some ways it’s a sad reality but the more it happens, the more you get used to it. That said, having some moderation in place for the comments does help a lot. Another major challenge is not obsessing over the numbers. It’s so tempting to check your stats every ten minutes, but realistically, nothing significant changes in that short space of time unless a video suddenly goes viral. In the early days, I’d constantly refresh to see if there was a big spike in views, but most of the time it’s just a slow, steady climb. You start to realise that letting the numbers dictate how you feel about your content isn’t healthy. Now, I try to separate myself from it a bit more and not let the analytics define my success or creativity.  

You mentioned you have a book coming out Tell us more. 

It out on June the 18th. It’s called Cravings And Comforts, and is unsurprisingly all about comfort food, because that's pretty much what makes up most of my channel. It’s nothing too fancy. You do see a lot of chefs doing loads of great complicated stuff. And that's amazing. But my skill levels are nowhere near that. So yeah, it's very much comfort food, home cooking.

Other than a book, and famous people knowing who you are. How much would you say your life has changed since you started posting content online? 

I get recognised, especially if I go to London for work. There's always a joke when we go out about how many times I'll get spotted by people. We went to crazy golf once and there were three people that recognized me. Then we went to a pub, and someone's like, ‘Oh, my God! It's Dinner with Jon’. Getting recognised is one of those weird things, because doing social media is just you and a screen. There's no camera crew. There's nobody else involved. It’s just me just filming it, shooting it, editing it and posting it. So, it's that real world meeting the virtual world which can be a little bit interesting. I try not to focus on it too much. I have a day job as well, so I do my day job 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and then this is my hobby. I try not to take it too seriously, and I try not to let it drag me down too much because it's just a bit of fun for me at the end of the day.   

Joe's ice cream or Verdi's? 

Joe's.  I used to love going there, especially in the summer. I did a couple of summer placements, so I'd stay in Swansea. Swansea summer. There was nothing quite like it.