Hawke’s Bay artist Dick Frizzell and Christian Kasper are on a mission to create a cookbook, dubbed ‘Cooking 4 Change’, featuring 101 New Zealand celebrities’ two favourite recipes, with all proceeds of the retail edition going to Auckland City Mission, Paw Justice, The Starship Foundation, and Leukemia and Blood Cancer New Zealand.

And as these things are wont to do these days, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the production of the book and the cost of going to the celebrity chef’s homes and filming the experience, presumably to make sure the cooking really did take place. Never trust a celebrity.

But why Kickstarter?

Kasper explains the Kickstarter benefit:

With Kickstarter, he says, “we have a crowd out there who already knows about the product, who are talking about it, and keeping the conversation going. By the time the book is published, we’ve got an audience already.”

Image: A smorgasbord of Kiwi stars have been enlisted for the Cooking 4 Change project

The road to Kickstarter nirvana has not been all smooth sailing however, with Kasper admitting there was so much they didn’t know when they started out. (They have since taken on a PR person and a Kickstarter consultant to tease out the finer details of starting a campaign.)

“It’s a matter of timing everything properly,” he says. “In social media there are certain times when you want to get your message out, there are certain rewards, some incentives, certain downtimes etcetera and you have to adjust your social advertising accordingly”.

Business partners Frizzell and Kasper have invested around $60,000 into the campaign themselves and have a goal of $28,000 from the campaign itself, with that money going towards “a lot of advertising, incentives and rewards” that precede the book’s publication mid-May next year.

The basic target of $28,000 was set to get over the hump of the basic production of the book but if more money is raised, it will be invested into the videography quality and the production value of the cookbook.

Frizzell is the face behind the campaign and of the cookbook itself and says he’s not above using a bit of his own celebrity to recruit others to the cause.

“It’s my reputation and my emails that are getting the celebrities on board and making those connections. The New Zealand celebrities are very generous and have been passing the message on to their friends – Anika Moa tells Dave Dobbyn and so on. We have got to keep the hype up.”

Image: Personal visits to Frizzell’s studio are among the rewards for backer of the Kickstarter project

And hyping-up they are with Facebook ads coming soon, celebrities sharing posts and updates about the campaign, a Breakfast TV interview, and an exclusive Tiki Taane gig on offer. 

Support the campaign here.