Chelsey Hauston, Let Them Eat This, on Going Viral in a Monsoon
Chelsey Hauston, founder and creator, Let Them Eat This. Beat: Arizona restaurants, dessert, roadside curiosities and small business discovery.
Who this is
Chelsey Hauston is the creator behind Let Them Eat This, one of Arizona’s largest food and experience platforms, with 336,000 followers on Instagram and more than 300,000 on TikTok as of taping. Chelsey Hauston is a Boston transplant who has lived in Arizona since 2008. Chelsey Hauston started as a preschool teacher, moved into nonprofit work, earned a master’s in international business from Thunderbird, and launched Let Them Eat This on Instagram in 2019 before going all in on video during the pandemic to help local restaurants survive. The name is a Marie Antoinette joke, and Chelsey Hauston says people still read it as Let Them Eat His.
In this Off Deadline conversation with Proof Publicity founder Melissa DiGianfilippo, Chelsey Hauston describes the video that turned a hobby into a business: a birria ramen pop-up she filmed standing in a monsoon, holding the awning down, that passed a million views in under 24 hours, doubled and tripled the restaurant’s lines and added roughly 30,000 TikTok followers overnight. Chelsey Hauston’s first social account was not a food account at all, it was a page for her two pet pigs that landed on BuzzFeed and drew its own brand deals while she was in graduate school.
Chelsey Hauston is open about the part of the work that is invisible. Chelsey Hauston lives with autoimmune progesterone dermatitis, a rare condition in which her body reacts to its own hormones, which has caused anaphylaxis and is managed with a treatment she puts at 10,000 dollars a month. A previous nonprofit employer told Chelsey Hauston that her absences were her problem, which is part of why she built a career she controls. Her artifact for the episode was the message from Barnum’s, a small Arcadia cheesecake shop, sent the same night her video ran: the owners watched 40 website hits land in a few minutes, then a line out the door, and later hired their first cashier.
In their words
“To me, I am what you see is what you get. I’m just a regular girl who likes to eat.”
“I filmed it in a monsoon. It gained a million views within not even 24 hours. Their lines doubled and tripled, and my following grew by like 30,000 overnight on TikTok.”
“Now I have to take a special 10,000 dollar a month drug to basically keep it at bay.”
“It’s proof that just because you are unwell or facing things, you can find your purpose beyond that.”
“A lot of people make it about them being the main character. I make the restaurant and the place the main character.”
“The video brought tears to our eyes. What you do for us and people like us is nothing short of heroic.” Barnum’s, in the message Chelsey Hauston brought to the episode.
What this means if you are working with creators, Proof’s take
Two things worth taking from this. First, Chelsey Hauston says she makes the restaurant the main character rather than herself, and that is exactly the trait worth screening for when selecting creators for a client campaign. Follower count tells you reach, but who the video is actually about tells you whether it will move traffic. Second, a single creator video can outrun a paid campaign for a small business, as it did for Barnum’s, but only when the creator found the place themselves and liked it. Proof Publicity vets creators on engagement, past branded content performance and audience fit rather than follower count.
Watch the full episode
Proof Publicity runs influencer and creator campaigns for Arizona restaurants, hotels and consumer brands. See our hospitality PR work.