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‘It’s not a food show in the traditional sense’: René Redzepi’s decade-long vision comes to the screen
René Redzepi, founder of prized three-Michelin star restaurant Noma, has been dreaming up Omnivore for at least a decade.
None of the usual ingredients of food shows are present in this eight-part docoseries; in fact, as Omnivore’s executive producer Ben Liebmann explains to Mumbrella, the exploratory documentaries of David Attenborough were the key inspiration for this ambitious undertaking.
Libemann is the founder of Understory, a global agency, advisory and management company. He also spent seven years as chief operating officer at Noma, making him uniquely qualified to bring Redzepi’s vision to the screen.
Omnivore traverses over a dozen countries, exploring “the ingredients that built societies, shaped our beliefs, and forever altered the human story,” according to the sell on AppleTV+, who is screening the series.
“From salt flats in Peru to coffee forests in Rwanda to wild tuna off the coast of Spain, each episode of “Omnivore” celebrates the way we grow, transform, and consume the world’s best resources — the ones we eat.”
Let’s start with Omnivore, it’s a massive production. Was it three and a half years in the making, or even longer?
Well, I guess it depends on how far you want to go back. René Redzepi, co-creator of the show, founder of Noma, he’s been thinking of this idea for over a decade. In fact, he shared it with me the first time I ever met him, which was around 2013. This idea of stepping out of the restaurant, stepping away from chefs, and kind of looking at the world through the lens of food, in the way that Attenborough looked at it through the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom.
That was around 2013 when I first met him, I was working at Shine. You fast forward then to 2019, by that point I’m at Noma. A variety of things kind of got in the way, so to speak, that delayed us coming back to that project.
But we came to it in 2019, brought on board our partner, Fifth Season, and the studio. By the end of that year, the pandemic hit, but we sold the show in 2020, in about November 2020. Production started in early 2021. I think the journey was probably five years from ‘let’s do this’ to the series dropping on screens.
But in terms of picking up cameras and starting active production on it, yeah, it was about three-and-a-half years.
And as you mentioned, you’ve worked on the other side of things. You’ve also worked in the music industry. What have you taken from each of those experiences that helped you in this?
The unromantic response that I have often given is it’s all intellectual property. And that’s not to take the romanticism out of extremely creative industries, whether it be the music industry or film and television or restaurants and hospitality, because they are, in my personal belief, some of, if not the most important creative industries that we have. But seeing these things as intellectual property, whether in the kind of literal or loose sense of it, has always been important to me in terms of identifying and valuing and protecting the creativity, but also the people behind it, the people who are creating these things every day.
The other thing I would say is those industries, music, television, hospitality, for me anyway, are fundamentally the same. They are creative industries. They are heavily dependent on kind of creative human capital on both sides of the table, whether it be a musician or a songwriter, showrunner, a host, chef, all the people that consume it.
They are fundamentally human and human-capital-dependent industries. What that creates is a dynamic in that: I’ve said it to the people in those industries, there are very few industries where one bad review can send you out of business. We’ve seen one negative review take an album that was anticipated to launch in the top 10 and it launches in the top 50 and then it’s gone.
Or a television show that, you know, didn’t launch to expectations in primetime and within a week has been bumped to a Saturday afternoon or off the air.
And there are examples of restaurants that have received that brutal critical review and that have been out of business weeks or months later. And, you know, there’s a case here, in fact, of a restaurant that sued a newspaper for the impact and the damage that one of those reviews created.
For me, there’s a dynamic there that is very familiar for me in every one of those industries.
Mounting something at the scale of this, is certainly no different to some of the other television production companies that I was around, but to some degree, no different to mounting a music tour or a concert tour or a pop-up tour, you know, bringing Noma to Australia or bringing Noma to Mexico – perhaps not at the scale of a 15-country tour TV series, but certainly large-scale exercises in their own right.
How is Apple to work with?
You’ll probably expect me to say it, but, very heartfelt, they were the best of partners. In fact, as I said at the launch in New York about two weeks ago, they were the only people that we wanted to make this show with.
We believe they shared the values and the purpose of the series. We believed in the way that they support creative talent, whether that be musicians or film and television producers or talent, on-screen talent. But I actually think looking back on it, they were the only partner that we could have made it with because, you know, as you identified at the beginning, this is a big-scale production.
It’s not a food show in the traditional sense. It certainly stands on the shoulders of many of them, but it’s not a traditional food show. So the scale of this, the ambition of this required a partner with a similar scale in their own right and a shared vision and ambition, and they were fantastic to work with, absolutely.
And as you said, Rene’s had this vision for this show for at least a decade. Was it hard trying to protect his original vision, while doing it at this scale, where you’re just one part of this huge machine?
One of the reasons why we took the time that we did to even get started was, and this was, again, me at this point being inside kind of a hospitality business, but having come from Fremantle Media and Shine, was I knew that — not only from protecting that original idea, but protecting him, but also for him to share in the soils of realising this idea — he had to be more than just an inverted commas talent. And so we set up a vehicle. And that vehicle then formed the partnership with Fifth Season, our studio partner, and ultimately formed a partnership with Apple.
That gave him protection of both the underlying kind of idea and co-ownership of that idea, but allowed him to kind of realise something that is not only very personal to him, but is ultimately a representation of his philosophy in that of 20-year-old restaurant.
This series is not a René Redzepi documentary, nor is it a Noma documentary. At the same time, it’s both of those things, because it speaks to a mission and purpose and philosophy that he’s kind of practised inside his restaurant for over 20 years.
Putting that response aside, I think one of the reasons why working with Apple was the right thing was because they believed in the bigger idea. Others, along the way, as we were developing the idea, had said, ‘surely he’s going to be on screen’ and ‘surely he’ll be the host’. And that was never a consideration.
It was never part of the pitch, and Apple bought into that, not only because they saw the thinking and the rationale behind it, and that was we felt the best people to tell these stories were the people whose stories we wanted to share and celebrate with the world. The world didn’t need another roving reporter, so to speak. Let the people whose stories we want to share tell their own stories. Apple believed in that.
What have the reactions been like?
Pretty unanimously positive.
We’ve been really heartened by, obviously, the response of our partner in Apple there, and they certainly love the series and have gotten behind that. It’s been amazing to see a company like Apple’s marketing and comms team really kind of step into action and do one of the things that they do best. The media has received it extremely well in terms of reviews and responses to that, but I think ultimately the trade, and for us when Rene refers to the trade, he’s talking about his peers, the people within the food and hospitality community, they and the audience have responded really well to it.
We’re now in the hands of the streaming gods as to whether or not we’ll have an opportunity to continue telling these stories, something we want to do, but I don’t think we could have asked for a better, or more positive response.
Omnivore is available to watch now on AppleTV+
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