Stephen Satterfield’s profile rose after he became the host of Netflix’s 2021 docuseries High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. Now he’s helping other emerging culinary talents get noticed. Recently, he created Hone, a talent agency specifically focused on connecting brands with food-world figures—from chefs and recipe developers to farmers and food preservationists. The newly minted agency has signed a roster of 16 clients since its launch in February. What unites them, Satterfield says, is that they have “a great intention and purpose in all of their work.”
It’s a quality that he is uniquely conditioned to spot. When Satterfield started in the food industry nearly 20 years ago, after completing culinary school, he became a sommelier. He quickly grew so intent in raising the profile of South African winemakers that he created the International Society of Africans in wine. Then, as he expanded his career over the next decade with stints in other areas of the restaurant business (including a period as manager of San Francisco’s Nopa), the Atlanta native became preoccupied with the Eurocentric focus he saw in mainstream media’s food coverage. As a response, he founded Whetstone, a magazine that explores food origins. It expanded in 2018 into Whetstone Media, which now includes 12 podcasts, television projects, and Rasa, a spin-off magazine focused on South Asian food.
Though platforms such as TikTok and YouTube allow home cooks, farmers, chefs, foragers, food writers, and other culinary creative types to bypass traditional food media outlets and share their food stories with their own audiences in ways that weren’t possible before, Hone is helping them boost their own trajectory, and their earning power. “I’m trying to share a lot of the privileges that have been afforded to me through my own access and opportunities,” Satterfield says, which “can be transformational.”
This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2023. Discover the full list of groundbreakers who’ve achieved something meaningful in the past year.
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