When a book becomes the bible of its sector it can gain financial and market power. This month I caught up with the premier status of The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide (Penguin Books, A$24.95). The 23rd edition for 2008 will be out in October. The Guide and the Good Food Awards are affiliated. Here's a list of the 2007 Award winners. 

The Guide and restaurant reviews in the Herald's Good Living weekly lift out together reach millions of readers. This Herald stable is arguably Sydney's most powerful food criticism media. I learned all this as a result of watching the first episode of Heat in the Kitchen, a documentary series in a repeat run on SBS Television (Saturday, 6pm) and credited largely to Ruth Cullen, director / co-writer / camera.

This week in The cooks, the critics, the restaurant proprietors and their court cases I discussed a court case involving Matthew Evans, one of the Herald's reviewers from 2001 to 2005. It also mentions a restaurant review court case involving, Leo Schofield, a Herald restaurant reviewer from 1983 to 1992.

Today I want to focus on how TCP/IP and other Internet technologies help some chefs and enterprising food industry players steer their own destiny making them less dependant on critics, press reviews and marketing  and promotion by others.

How an electronic walkabout leads to bushfood.

Benjamin Christie (pictured right) is one such wired chef. Go on an electronic walkabout at his eponymous blog and you'll quickly marvel at his IT fluency.

His career and today's post illustrate disintermediation, defined thus by AskOxford.com: "noun Economics reduction in the use of intermediaries between producers and consumers, e.g. by involvement in the securities market directly rather than through a bank."  

Benjamin's most recent post is on his content's distribution via Joost. Joost is a high quality, Internet TV platform developed by the same people behind Skype. To learn more visit www.australianfoodtv.com.

Joost helps deliver content, but who has the content?

Years of development work are overviewed in Benjamin's bio. His off line or "physical product" credits include joint creative and business roles in The Dining Downunder Cookbook co-published in 2004 with Vic Cherikoff, the 13 episode Dining Downunder TV series and another for US distribution still under wraps.

Benjamin works closely with Vic Cherikoff, a specialist in international distribution of genuine Australian ingredients, including wattleseed, lemon myrtle, blue gum smoke oil, alpine pepper, and paperbark.

How to benefit from disintermediation and TCP/IP like a professional.

With years of effort and investment both Benjamin and Vic have created an off line and online presence.

They have separately or collaboratively developed unique products, captured valuable trade marks and domain names, and created copyright content in text, photo, video and HTML formats. To this Vic has added the special ingredients of e-commerce and an online affiliate marketing program featuring his logos.

By using the Internet's format-agnostic lingua franca of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), their content is gaining mindshare off line and online by leapfrogging traditional media.

Disclosure: The author has acted as a legal adviser for Benjamin Christie and Vic Cherikoff. 

Further Reading

• Last 10 months - Lightbulb posts on food and beverage law in Australia & New Zealand:
• A recipe to make a high net worth celebrity chef 
• “Thirsty folk want beer, not explanations”
• Ribena's Purple Prose Penalty
• Intellectual property you can eat and drink
• Is Australian cheese properly branded?
• Striking gold with kiwifruit
• The Colour Purple: an exercise in expensive litigation
• Starbucks settles coffee trade mark law dispute
• Coffee brand values
• Liquor sector trends and statistics for 2007

Research Notes

• Today: Greg Aharonian, San Francisco patent law commentator, in his Internet Patent News Service writes: "[R]estaurants (along with cafes [i.e., Starbucks], and specific-food stores [i.e. Dunkin Donuts]) are big business, especially chains and specialty venues.  Like other businesses, they have their methods and processes - recipes; their articles of manufacture - food items and cooking equipment; system architectures - well, architectures; and financial business methods.  There are [in the United States] over 1,000 patents dealing with restaurants and recipes."
• This week: New York Times front page news - Chef Sues Over Intellectual Property (the Menu)
  
• This month: food IP in Hollywood - DeVito South Beach and Danny DeVito's Premium Limoncello.
• This month: US Forbes magazine's 14 June 2007 issue lists five chefs in The Celebrity 100. Their Forbes rank (which weighs earnings and other factors) and estimated "pay" from June 2006 to June 2007 are set out in the table below. A common feature of a number of them is presence on the Food Network. For a list of celebrity chefs on the Food Network go here.