It’s a late night in September, and Jerry Chen is preparing his workspace. He places his phone in the mount attached to the dashboard and sets up a tray that attaches to his steering wheel before pressing record. Then, he pulls out a giant Pizzookie platter — the viral cookie dessert that gained traction last spring — and shows it to the camera. “Did y’all know you can order a Pizzookie platter from BJ’s? ” he says. He dumps ice cream and sweet toppings on top of the giant cookie consisting of four separate flavors and digs in with a spoon. “Oh yeah, that hits the spot,” he says, noting, “the flakiness from the cookie, the sweetness from the strawberry jam.” Jerry isn’t digging into his Pizzookie in a booth in BJ’s or in his kitchen at home. Instead, he’s filming the review from the driver’s seat of his car.
If you’re on the food side of any social media platform, you’ve probably seen videos of food influencers filming product reviews, doing mukbangs, or even cooking in their cars. The in-car content is as delectable and bottomless as my stomach is when it comes to dessert — dozens of creators make their food content from behind the parked steering wheel. But what I want to know is why? Why review a new viral candy or eat a whole seafood boil in the car as opposed to at home? On my feed, I don’t see a lot of food review videos in creators’ homes. Instead, I see creators reviewing all kinds of foods, from fast food to the latest grocery store get, in the car. When I watch, I always ponder the potential difficulties of filming in a car — messiness, juggling large items, and working in a small space — and wonder why creators still choose the car every time.
I sat down with a few creators to get the inside (the car) scoop on what it’s like to film content in the car, and why they do it.
Spillage risks and space issues make filming in the car a tricky balancing act
Turns out, filming in a car is hard as the small space can be limiting and hard to keep clean. Working with food naturally creates a spill-prone environment, so filming food content in the car — between getting shots of the food and actually eating it — can quickly get grimy.
Then there’s the challenge of space. Lots of creators, including the three that I spoke with, often eat large items like whole cakes or pizzas or even turkeys in their cars, and trying to find a way to film that can be difficult. Plus, with large items or large quantities of items, it can be tough to manage it all in the space of the car.
“When you’re filming some of the large things…it’s kind of hard to, you know, hold that up and show it to the camera when your phone’s only so far away from you on the steering wheel,” said Sarah Margaret Sandlin in a phone call interview with Spoon University. “And if you have multiple items to show, it’s kinda hard to keep it all organized and keep it on the chair next to you.”
While lighting is great in the car, the sun can sometimes pose problems if it’s super bright and getting in the way of the shot. Plus, the weather in general can be an issue, especially if creators live in places with challenging weather patterns.
“The major challenges include making sure the food does not fall everywhere, and because I live in the desert, not overheating myself,” Morgan Chomps wrote in an email interview with Spoon University.
But, to these creators, the benefits far outway the challenges. And a lot of it has to do with logistics.
High recording quality, maintaining a brand, and clicks: the unseen reasons why in-car reviewing is ideal
Cars basically act like recording booths by providing a quiet place to film with great sound quality. Restaurants can be noisy and awkward to film in, so cars help avoid that stress. Plus, thanks to the windows, cars have great lighting. All in all, cars make the recording and editing process easier for reviewers.
“A car is a great ‘portable’ studio — it provides rather good sound in comparison to one’s kitchen or a room in the house, and the lighting is typically ideal as it promotes natural light,” said Morgan. “This means less equipment, less set-up, and less space than it takes up in the house overall.”
Cars as filming locations are ultimately a matter of convenience, which is especially important when reviewing things like fast food meals because you want to review the food while it’s still hot. So in a car, reviewers can grab the food, park, and pretty quickly get into filming the review, avoiding having to review room-temperature meals.
Plus, filming in restaurants sucks up a lot of time, and one of the great things about filming in the car is that it’s quick, from set-up to filming to editing. Videos that take a lot of time to make aren’t great in the long-term.
“I actually started with cooking content but the process took me a whole day which was not sustainable compared to making food reviews in the car,” Jerry Chen wrote in an email interview with Spoon University.
On the more technical side of influencing, cars provide the benefit of branding by keeping a consistent background, and videos filmed in the car generate the best traffic online, but when Sarah started, the reasons were much simpler.
“I began during COVID. And at that point, you couldn’t really go in restaurants and I think I made a McDonald’s video and it kind of went viral and it was in my car. So then I just kept continuing to do that,” said Sarah.
Now, however, the reasons for filming in the car simply add up to numbers.
“The performance of the car videos always does better than the in-store restaurants,” said Sarah. “I just noticed the views [of the videos in the car] were way up. I think people just love this content in the car.” Sarah’s most viral videos, which include Wendy’s and Dairy Queen meal hacks and a review of a viral Domino’s pizza order, have 4.6, 9, and 8.7 million views on Instagram, respectively. The one thing they have in common? They were all filmed in her car.
But what about when reviewers aren’t reviewing fast food products? Plenty of times, creators still film in the car when they review grocery store products or products that can or need to be made at home. Why? The answer is simple — consistency. Which means that creators might prepare things at home and then move to a different location in their cars to film their videos.
“I try to film all the content I can in my car since I want to maintain a similar, familiar setting across all my videos. This means having to film some interesting reviews in my car, but it’s worth it for homogeny’s sake,” said Morgan. “No matter the product I am reviewing, viewers expect to see me in my car.”