Kim Terakes – In his own words.

I grew up in a food business, had a very full advertising career and have finished up in food again, in several different ways.

My father ran a stand at the wholesale fruit markets and I worked as a labourer there during high school holidays and put myself through university (Communications and English Lit. BA) working there.

After six months at Channel Ten in staging, it was straight to advertising where I spent the next twenty five years.

I was on the board of Leo Burnett in Sydney at twenty six and head of account management at DDB by thirty. I worked at The Campaign Palace Melbourne when it was the best agency in the country and was MD of the elite creative shops OMON and Sargant Rollins Vranken Terakes in the nineties. I ran my own advertising business for several years after that.

During my ad career, I worked on a large number of food and beverage clients, including Penfolds, Carlton Special Beverages' portfolio, Tyrrell's, Streets, Moove, Big M, Sodastream, Vittoria, Gaggia, Everdure barbecues, Seakist and ayam and Chang's Asian foods.

Somewhere in there, I played nearly three hundred games of rugby.

More importantly, food writing has been my professional hobby since 1988, writing for Gourmet Traveler, Vogue Entertaining, BRW, Good Living, The Sunday Telegraph, reviewing for eight Good Food Guides, as the restaurant reviewer for the Sun Herald for a couple of years and then the joint wine writer with Peter Bourne for the next couple, introducing an unashamedly populist approach to wine writing at the time. I have been the food writer for GQ for the past seven years and just started a monthly column for Alpha magazine.

My advertising career gradually drifted into food, working on lots of food and alcoholic beverage related clients then taking on non-advertising consultancy jobs.
The past couple of years have seen my career consolidate exclusively in food.
Following a syndicated research study into future food trends among the top thirty chefs, providors and food writers in Australia, I developed a broad based presentation on where food is going which has been presented to more than two dozen of Australia's top food marketers and ad agencies such as Singleton, Clemenger, WhybinTBWA, Uncle Toby's, Masterfoods, KFC and Ingham's.

I started the Boys Can Cook cooking school back in October 2004. It took off and I have received an extraordinary amount of media exposure for it. I was a regular on Sally Loane's 702 radio show, did dozens of other radio spots, print in the Bulletin, Financial Review, Telegraph and Herald, the Today Show, Sydney Weekender, Sports Tonight and several appearances on Fresh. The website www.boyscancook.com.au gets quite reasonable traffic.

I introduced barbecue classes as a spin off of Boys Can Cook in November 2005, which had a good consumer response, very good media response and quite astonishing response from marketers. It seemed that everyone wants to ‘own' barbecuing. With significant sponsorship, www.aussiebarbie.com.au was launched. It now has over 13,000 members, six figure sponsorship and it is the biggest barbecue entity in Australia.

Aussie Barbie led to a cookbook deal with Penguin and my own weekly barbecue segment on the Fresh program on the Nine network through 2007. The Great Aussie Barbie Cookbook has sold 24,000 corporate copies and over 17,000 retail in less than a year. It also spawned regular eight page barbecue features in The Courier Mail, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph.

The Great Aussie Bloke's Cookbook, centred around the Boys Can Cook classes was  released late October and is selling faster than the first. I am currently photographing the third book, due for release 4th quarter 2009 and discussing a fourth with Penguin.

I also consult to restaurants (so no more reviewing), to Westfield and food marketers large and small, some on projects, others on an ongoing basis. As well, consult to the Bite Me hamburger chain, and to Pinpoint on the Penfolds brand. I am about to front the Cuisinart brand as its presenter in Australia.

A presentation which I researched jointly with a Four Corners producer called The Food Revolution, looking at the effect of obesity and diabetes on the Australian food and beverage industries is also being purchased by ad agencies, food marketers and media companies.

My life is a balance of food marketing consultancy, restaurant consultancy, food writing, cook books, teaching and the barbecue project, which is enough to keep me busy.

I manage lunch in a restaurant every day and cook to relax in my spare time.