Left to right: Sisters Carolyn ’10, Meg ’12, Patty ’14 and Charlotte Niemann have attracted a massive Instagram following through their celebration of food and travel.
Think you’re pretty good at Instagram? What about 315,000 followers good? That’s the current number of followers for Food In The Air.
The mega-popular Instagram account, often referred to by the acronym FITA, seductively combines the power of food photography and travel. Take a look at the feed and you’ll see doughnuts held against a backdrop of palm trees in Key West, a slice of pizza amid Manhattan traffic, or an everything bagel floating above Cistern Yard. In other words, this isn’t the food-on-a-plate-on-a-table shot you’d normally expect on social media.
While the sheer number of followers to FITA is impressive, it’s also worth noting that four of the five founders of the Instagram account are proud College of Charleston Cougars. Sisters Carolyn ’10, Meg ’12, Patty ’14 and Charlotte Niemann (a current student), as well as Carolyn’s now-fiancé George Broadbin, came up with the idea for the account while on a road trip to the Adirondacks in 2013. They thought that giving food photos a sense of place, literally hoisting their object of consumption into the air in an alluring setting, would be more interesting than the average, staged table photo.
Less than a year into FITA, submissions have started rolling in. The Niemann sisters and Broadbin now receive more than 100 photos a day from fans hoping to get on the Instagram account. Patty Niemann explains their popularity: “We were the first ‘foodie’ Instagram to combine travel and food with unique backdrops. When Food In The Air started, the standard food photography was an aerial view of the food on a table, now we see more foodies everyday that only use the ‘in the air.’”
When asked how the group would curate a Charleston photo, Patty explains, “First, we would choose a favorite location of ours, whether it be the Cistern, the Battery, or a favorite rooftop, so you could see the whole city. Then we’d choose a food from one of our favorite restaurants, such as Poe’s Tavern, Fuel, Cru Cafe, or O-Ku. Combine the two and you have the perfect FITA.”
Now that FITA has dominated Instagram feeds around the world, the group thinks a book might be the next step. They tell us that they would love to create a coffee table title, because, “Every picture tells a different story: where the person has traveled, the food from that area, which restaurant it’s from, and more.”
