We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Susannah and Bryce Gardner . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Susannah and Bryce below.

Susannah and Bryce, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Flash back to February 2019- since the beginning of our relationship 2 1/2 years prior, it had been a fun activity for us to try new restaurants together. We had been married for two years, living in Provo, Utah, and we were trying a new restaurant per week as well as sharing our discoveries with our friends. We were lying on the couch after a day full of teaching for Susannah and schoolwork for Bryce, and the thought came to Susannah- “We share so much about our food adventures with our friends- maybe others would appreciate our food reviews as well?” Susannah felt that she had been a consumer of social media long enough to understand the ‘language’ of marketing on platforms like Instagram, and could come up with posts that could capture the attention of a foodie audience looking for new restaurants to try. In this day and age of full of high quality iPhone pictures, anyone could be a novice food photographer and have their pictures noticed. Bryce agreed that this might be a fun idea, and, if it became more work than it was fun, we could always stop. Three and a half years, 10k + followers, and countless incredible foodie experiences later, and we are having more fun than ever.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We have both been passionate about food our whole lives, especially Susannah. While most kids were watching cartoons, 10-year-old Susannah was enjoying Food Network. She learned how to cook from spending time in the kitchen with her dad, and she was always so excited to go out to eat growing up. That excitement has only heightened into adulthood. Bryce doesn’t cook much, but he will definitely eat! He always says he has a second stomach for dessert. Susannah cooks, Bryce eats- we are the perfect match! A little bit more non-food related information about us: Bryce is currently a 3rd year dental student at Roseman University, and Susannah is a former Special Education teacher turned stay-at-home-mom/ part time online homeschool teacher. We have two beautiful girls- Hayden is almost 3 and Olive is 9 months old. We hope to raise them to be little foodies!

On social media, it can often be difficult to discern who is genuine. We are proud of the fact that we have an authentic following and we stand by each of our food reviews 100%. We feel that we have set ourselves apart from others because we make eating out a family activity, and we are very vocal about that on social media. If you are looking for food reviews that include our cute kids, we are your people! We primarily work on Instagram and share pictures, stories, and more recently, reels of restaurants throughout Utah. Every few months, we run a Peoples Choice food championship. So far, we have done fries, chicken sandwiches, pizza, tacos, burgers, brisket, and sushi. It has been so fun to get restaurants involved and bring positive publicity to more places. Some of them have been real nail biters!

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

For the first six months of having Utah’s Best Bites, we did not know that there were any foodies nearby. It wasn’t until we were invited to our first event that we met a handful of foodie friends who quickly became valuable resources for any and all social media questions, food recommendations, and general advice. The Utah foodie community is a close-knit group of wonderful individuals who all share a passion for food. We all support each other and there’s always room for more food lovers!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

It was the hardest to build our following when we were below 1,000 followers. We don’t blame people for not wanting to follow us at first- we still had to build up our reputation. In fact, we actually gave away a gift card of our own money when we hit 100 followers because we were so grateful for our very first supporters! The biggest thing that helped us grow initially was partnering with restaurants for giveaways. When people tagged their friends and shared on their stories, it was the best advertising for Utah’s Best Bites! Later on, People’s Choice food championships would bring a lot of people to our page. We have learned that giving incentive to check us out pays off. Another important way we have built up our audience is by being consistent. We started our foodie page when Susannah was pregnant with our first child, and as our family has grown, we have been sure to keep up with sharing as regularly as we can as we have adjusted to big life changes.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/utahsbestbites/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/utahsbestbites
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=bhQQkghsQNr_eXGAqn5xig https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=qU5Lh3NQMIowPQejar7gtA
• Other: Email: [email protected]