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Food + Activism = Global Change
World-renowned chef ANDREW ZIMMERN has explored the great global food scene and shares incredible stories from his journeys around the world with a powerful prescriptive message of sustainability, equity, and global citizenship. Zimmern believes you really can change the planet one meal at a time. His talks are enlightening and always entertaining as he inspires audiences to learn about the world and other cultures from the perspective of the board room and the dinner table.
Overcoming Adversity: Becoming a Resilient Leader
World-renowned chef and entrepreneur ANDREW ZIMMERN shares his deeply personal journey with addiction and sobriety and how he found his calling to tell stories through food and travel adventures. Balancing personal and professional moments of adversity, Zimmern offers an inspiring of hope, perseverance, and how to become a better leader through resilience. From navigating uncertainty to “co-regulating before operationalizing” to learning how to “act your way into right thinking,” Zimmern’s message is a blend of personal experience and his own prescription for resiliency and success.
Virtual Interactive Cooking Demos with Andrew Zimmern
World-renowned chef ANDREW ZIMMERN knows how to engage your virtual audience and create magical events from his professional cooking studio. He can even share the recipes in advance so guests can have the thrill of cooking along with Andrew. What separates Andrew, however, is all that he is doing outside of the kitchen to bolster the restaurant industry, and the insights he has gained as a passionate student of what food says about us as people, families and a country. While he cooks, he chats about these insights and the many projects he is working on to bring us closer together - in meaningful ways- through food.
Food: A Global Perspective on the State of our Food Life
ANDREW ZIMMERN takes you with him for a whirlwind tour of his world travels, informing and entertaining as he connects the audience to both his "boots on the ground" experience and his philosophies of both food and life. His amazing stories cover everything from the great global food scene to how you really can change the planet one meal at a time, as he's experienced firsthand breaking bread (or other things!) with people from Syria and China to Cuba and the Kalahari desert. Inspiring, enlightening and always entertaining, Zimmern shows that the world is truly getting smaller, and that the best place to learn about it and other cultures, is at the dinner table, not in a museum.
The Adventure of Recovery
Stay far away from what William James called the evil of "contempt prior to investigation". ANDREW ZIMMERN has used this motto as a bedrock of both his personal and professional life. While most people know him as the host of his own wildly popular TV show, they might not know that he is also a survivor of drug addiction, alcoholism, and homelessness. Now in his 21st year of sobriety, his inspiring and funny story is a prescription for hope that can be applied to anyone regardless of their life situation. Zimmern grew up on the upper east side of NYC, was a daily drug user from the age of 15, and lay dying in a hospital bed at age 21 of acute alcohol poisoning. He continued to abuse drugs and booze for another 10 years before going homeless and off the grid in 1990. Drinking himself to death in a flop house hotel in January of 1992, he had a life-changing experience that saw him check into rehab, sober up, and stay clean. Devoting himself to helping others, his life changed, and his show Bizarre Foods is a direct result of his channeling that life choice, telling his stories through food and travel adventures. Zimmern combines his personal and professional stories in an audio and video presentation detailing his fall and rise, his experiences in recovery, and how those lessons have informed his life as a husband, adoptive father and activist for the social issues he holds dearest. Zimmern believes that the best way to change the world is to share a meal with a stranger and his family, telling stories from the fringe as you seek to learn about the world and yourself in the global classroom of the traveler's universe. His funny and inspiring message spans both the personal and the professional, and he gladly exemplifies the necessity for a public face to be put on the private hell of addiction.
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Andrew Zimmern fights global hunger with the U.N. World Food Programme as a Goodwill Ambassador
You will want to hear from the man that Fast Company and AdAge called “…one of the 50 most influential people in food.”
Award-winning chef, TV personality, and anthropologist ANDREW ZIMMERN fights food waste and global hunger as a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization. Zimmern challenges audiences everywhere to take action in cultivating a food system that's sustainable and equitable. He speaks on domestic and global hunger solutions, food systems, trends, why smart food policy is good for big food, and more. Upon his appointment, Zimmern said, “I am so grateful to the World Food Programme for asking me to help in their global effort to fight hunger and food waste. We have it within our power to reverse the ravages of our own ignorance, inefficiency, and selfishness.”
Zimmern believes you can change the planet one meal at a time. In his enlightening, entertaining conversations, he inspires audiences to address global food culture from the perspectives of the board room all the way to the dinner table.
Watch Andrew Zimmern in conversation at SXSW here >>
Watch Andrew Zimmern host a fundraiser at Second Harvest Heartland here>>
Event Success Story: David Chang and Andrew Zimmern cook up innovation at The National Association of Convenience Stores
The National Association of Convenience Stores featured DAVID CHANG and ANDREW ZIMMERN in a program designed to address an industry trend of convenience stores becoming more than a place to get gas and buy cigarettes. Zimmern and Chang “shopped the show” for ingredients, to create a recipe from the ingredients inspired by the guests and representatives they met at each booth. The following day, they presented a cooking demo of their recipes while reflecting on their love of convenience stores. According to NACS, “The total attendance was 8.5% higher than attendance from last year and 3.8% higher than the previous record attendance in 2018.”
Andrew Zimmern takes his audience on an outdoor adventure and cooks up fish and wild game in entertaining demos
With his brand new show Field to Fire, ANDREW ZIMMERN takes his audience on an adventure that will whet their appetite for nature and the incredible meals that can be found there. Globally beloved chef and lifelong outdoorsman Zimmern loves getting out on the water and into the field in search of the best walleye, pheasant, partridge, wild boar, and even squirrel.
Zimmern and his company Intuitive Content (a Realscreen top 100 production company three years running) premiered Andrew Zimmern's Wild Game Kitchen in 2022, and this year they will premiere Field to Fire, both on the Outdoor Channel. Intuitive Content has worked with companies like Whirlpool, Marriott, Caribou Coffee, Sleep Number, Hy-Vee, and more.
After an exciting hunting or fishing adventure, Zimmern brings his haul back to the lake house kitchen and demonstrates how to cook up sustainable proteins in new and delicious ways. For the avid outdoor types, Zimmern’s Field to Fire show and live demos are an entertaining and refreshing look at how to make the most of your fish and wild game. For everyone from experts to those new to the outdoors, Zimmern’s expertise in the kitchen and passion for the great outdoors will resonate with every audience.
Activist Andrew Zimmern invited to the White House to feed the U.S.
Award-winning chef, TV personality, and anthropologist ANDREW ZIMMERN was tapped by the U.S. government to share his perspective at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Zimmern is an outspoken advocate for solving hunger. He also serves as a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. World Food Programme. In this endeavor, Zimmern worked with policymakers to better serve vulnerable populations. Zimmern’s humanitarian impact can be felt at home and abroad as he works to create a more sustainable, delicious future.
Watch Andrew Zimmern’s keynote at U. of Minnesota here >>
Watch Andrew Zimmern host a fundraiser at Second Harvest Heartland here>>
Andrew Zimmern on Community: Sharing Food is Sharing Culture
Award-winning chef, TV personality, and anthropologist ANDREW ZIMMERN looks at food as more than nourishment; to him, food is the best lens for studying culture. From that learning comes ways in which we can change our planet and our communities for the better. Zimmern explores what food represents — the ideas shared and connections cultivated over a meal — in over a hundred countries and applies those to our current existential problems today, from feeding a hungry planet, to climate change, from building bridges to using new and old science to eradicate food waste.
Zimmern has dedicated his life to driving change and promoting cultural exchanges through food. His 350-episode tenure as the creator and host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods franchise, and his Emmy-nominated The Zimmern List all intended to encourage patience, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures through sharing food. By showcasing the human element of eating, Zimmern encourages audiences to respectfully engage with diverse cultures to learn more and problem solve.
Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern hosts memorable live cooking demonstrations
Legendary chef, traveler, and TV personality ANDREW ZIMMERN teaches audiences how to travel on a plate. When he's not trying foods from around the world, Zimmern is helping the home cook broaden their palate with dishes inspired from his travels. Zimmern is an advocate for cultural literacy, sharing essential meals from cultures around the world through his storytelling about how we are all connected through food.
Zimmern’s cooking tutorial content lives on his YouTube channel, where he hosts independent series on cooking and culture. Zimmern is founder and CEO of Intuitive Content, a full-service television, commercial, and digital production company. Named by Realscreen for 3 years in a row as one of the “Top 100 Production Companies in the World,” Intuitive Content produces much of Zimmern’s cutting-edge digital content. A master of both the kitchen and the boardroom, Zimmern engages audiences with his creative approach to food education.
Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern on sobriety, resilience, and leadership
While most people know ANDREW ZIMMERN as a beloved TV host, celebrity chef, and anthropologist, they might not know that he is also a survivor of drug addiction, alcoholism, and homelessness. Zimmern combines personal and professional stories detailing his experiences in recovery, and how he found the resilience to build back a life of creating meaning for others through doing what he loves. He shares how those lessons have informed his life as a husband, adoptive father, and activist for the social issues he holds dearest.
Over 3 decades into sobriety, Zimmern’s inspiring and humorously delivered story is a prescription for hope that can be applied to anyone. He has been invited to speak on resilience and sobriety with CNN, People, Mashed, and more.
Andrew Zimmern is an Emmy-winning and four-time James Beard Award-winning TV personality, chef, writer and passionate global citizen. As the creator, executive producer and host of the Bizarre Foods franchise, Andrew Zimmern’s Driven by Food, MSNBC’s What’s Eating America, Magnolia Network’s Emmy-nominated Family Dinner, Outdoor Channel’s Wild Game Kitchen and the Emmy-winning The Zimmern List, he has devoted his life to exploring and promoting cultural acceptance, tolerance and understanding through food. You can also find him judging Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend on Netflix, The Silos Baking Competition on HBO Max and mentoring young chefs on Food Network’s All Star Academy. Later this year, he will premiere Andrew Zimmern’s Field to Fire.
A Taste of the Good—and Bad— Life
Andrew knew from a young age he wanted a career in food. After attending The Dalton School and Vassar College, he cooked in New York City restaurants for Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal and Thomas Keller, amongst others. Andrew helped open and run a dozen restaurants, and at the same time was also an alcoholic and addict, spiraling out of control. After a year spent living on the streets, an intervention by close friends brought him to the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. Transforming his life around sobriety, Andrew took a job washing dishes at Minneapolis’ Café Un Deux Trois. In 1992, he was named executive chef 6 months later and during his almost 7-year tenure, turned Un Deux Trois into an awarded, national caliber restaurant.
Making Moves in the Media
Andrew's menu at Un Deux Trois drew the attention of media. Local news appearances led to regular TV work as the ‘in-house chef’ on HGTV’s early slate of programming. Eventually he found a job as a features reporter for the local news, became Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s dining critic and restaurant columnist, and hosted his own drive time radio show. In 2003, Andrew filmed a pilot for the show that ultimately became Bizarre Foods. Since Bizarre Foods first aired in 2006, he’s created the spin offs Bizarre World, Bizarre Foods America and Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations.
In 1997, Andrew founded the Minneapolis-based, multi-media company Food Works, which oversees his digital, print and social initiatives, including podcasting, his website (www.andrewzimmern.com) and publishing projects. Food Works has grown to include all of Andrew’s consulting work, business development, and holds all his charitable endeavors, board work and business relationship management.
Published in 2009, Andrew’s first book, The Bizarre Truth, offers a behind-the-scenes look at cultures in his favorite destinations. Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food: Brains, Bugs and Blood Sausage (2011) gives younger fans a backstage look at his culinary adventures. A book for young adults, Andrew Zimmern's Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, Wonderful Foods (2012) is a pop culture-influenced look at bizarre ingredients. His latest offering, a grade level reader series called Alliance of World Explorers, Volume 1: AZ and the Lost City of Ophir was released in 2019 and won the Gold IPPY in Juvenile Fiction.
Creating Compelling and Impactful Content
In 2014, Andrew founded Intuitive Content, a full-service production company that develops and produces dynamic original television and specials, while partnering with companies to create brand-driven series and digital content. Intuitive Content was named one of the top 100 production companies in the world by Realscreen for the past three years in a row.
In 2020, Intuitive Content created the MSNBC series What’s Eating America, which explores the most provocative stories of our time told from Andrew’s singular perspective with his passion for politics, people, food and travel. In 2021, they premiered Family Dinner on Magnolia Network, which follows Andrew as he discovers how the cultural, regional, and historical facets of who we are inform what and how we eat. In 2023, Family Dinner was nominated for two Emmy awards for Culinary Series and Culinary Host. In 2022, they premiered Andrew Zimmern’s Wild Game Kitchen, and in 2024 they will premiere Field to Fire, both on the Outdoor Channel.
Intuitive Content’s first television series, Andrew Zimmern’s Driven by Food, premiered on Travel Channel in August 2016. In their second series, The Zimmern List, Andrew reveals his favorite food experiences in cities across the country. In 2020, the show won a Daytime Emmy Award for “Outstanding Travel and Adventure Program.” Other Intuitive Content series include Hope in the Water, Feral, Big Food Truck Tip, Crash Test World, Zoe Bakes and How to Survive a Murder.
Beyond television, Intuitive Content works with clients on branded entertainment and advertisements, including a partnership with Hy-Vee to produce a digital cooking series Seafood Without the Catch, with Renaissance Hotels to create The Navigator’s Table and with Caribou Coffee to film Behind the ‘Bou. In 2021, they partnered with Cointreau and the Independent Restaurant Coalition to create a Super Bowl ad featuring restaurant workers affected by Covid 19. The ad was awarded a silver Telly. Their digital work includes Andrew in the Kitchen, a companion series to Bizarre Foods that was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2018, Bravo TV’s Beats + Bites with the Potash Twins, instructional cooking classes for Food Network Kitchen and video workshops for Magnolia Network.
Andrew has appeared on Beat Bobby Flay, Bobby’s Triple Threat and the original Food Network Iron Chef, as a guest judge on episodes of Chopped, Top Chef Masters, Top Chef, and Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions.
Innovative Culinary Concepts and Partnerships
In 2015, Andrew launched Passport Hospitality, which creates unique culinary concepts and provides consulting services to various restaurant and retail projects. Passport Hospitality oversees several brands, including the hot dog and burger concept Patty & Frank’s, located in Atlanta’s Chattahoochee food hall. His first brick-and-mortar restaurant, Lucky Cricket, opened in 2018 in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.
Passport Hospitality has partnered with Robert Montwaid and Gansevoort Construction to develop experiential food halls and markets in Atlanta’s recently opened Chattahoochee Food Works. Andrew has also collaborated with Minneapolis chef Gavin Kaysen to create KZ ProVisioning, a unique catering company whose sole clients are professional sports franchises. KZ ProVisioning works with the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, the NBA’s Timberwolves and the WNBA’s Lynx to provide healthy meals to the team’s players, families, coaches, executives and staff. Passport’s largest effort to date is overseeing all food service contracting and development for the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington DC, opening in 2024.
Delicious Life
In 2020 and 2023, Andrew was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host. He has won James Beard awards for "TV Food Personality" (2010), “TV Program on Location” (2012), and “Outstanding Personality/Host” (2013 and 2017). In 2021, the Taste Awards created a special achievement award, The Andrew Zimmern Discovery Award, that honors his mission to discover new cultures and flavors. Andrew has been named one of “America’s 50 Most Powerful People in Food” by The Daily Meal, one of the “30 Most Influential People in Food” by Adweek and as one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business.” According to Eater, “Zimmern knows more about the foods of the world and the history of modern gastronomy than anyone else in our solar system. He’s a walking, talking food encyclopedia, and a true omnivore.”
Andrew hosted the three-part 2019 Conversations at Copia in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America to publicize, educate and amplify the hard conversations around social justice and food. He is an entrepreneur-in-residence at The Lewis Institute for Social Innovation at Babson College. In 2022, he was a contributor to the White House Strategic Policy for Hunger, Nutrition and Health and a contributor to the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. Through the James Beard Foundation and the Culinary Institute of America he funds Andrew Zimmern’s Second Chances Scholarships, which offer students faced with extreme challenges an opportunity to follow a culinary path.
Andrew sits on the board of directors of Services for the UnderServed, EXPLR Media, Soigne Hospitality, Giving Kitchen and Beans is How. He is on the advisory board of Procure Impact and the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, and serves on City Harvest’s Food Council. Andrew is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations World Food Programme and The Nature Conservancy, and is the International Rescue Committee’s Voice for Nutrition. He is a founding member of the Coalition for Sustainable Aquaculture and the Independent Restaurant Coalition, fighting to save restaurants affected by Covid-19. Other charities Andrew works with include Lovin’ Spoonfuls, ONE, Food Policy Action Committee, and No Kid Hungry. In his rare downtime, Andrew relaxes in Minneapolis, spending time with family and his dogs Luca and Clemmie.
My Speaker List
