In Tiruppur, a small town near Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, an old man named Armugam and his 26-year-old son named Gopinath are making traditional cooking trendy again with their YouTube channel called Village Food Factory.
A variety of dishes like crab curry, full mutton leg curry and even a dish made with stingrays are cooked on firewood.
Source: YouTube, Village Food Factory
On November 6, they released a video of Armugam cooking 300 hundred eggs in a rustic, outdoor setting. This video, which ends with Armugam relishing the egg curry with rice on a banana leaf, subsequently went viral and managed to clock more than 3.8 million views.
[embedvideo id=”3qRX-y706Ms” website=”youtube”]
The Village Food Factory channel features 42 videos, which have garnered more than 30 million views since it was launched. The channel was set up by Gopinath, who has a diploma in electronics and communications. He shoots the videos with the assistance of his younger brother Manikandan, who features in the videos, helping his father cook in open fields.
Source: YouTube, Village Food Factory
The family has even managed to make the YouTube channel a viable business model; after launching Village Food Factory, they earned more than Rs 6.5 lakh in less than six months. This incomes is derived from Google Adsense, a Google service that displays ads on YouTube channels. Gopinath told The Weekend Leader, “I got my first payment of Rs 8,000. The next month I got Rs 45,000, which went up to Rs 1.05 lakh in the third month. Last month it increased to Rs 3.10 lakh. In the last eight days, I already have Rs 2.13 lakh in my account.”
“My dream of making him (Armugam) famous has been realised by 10 per cent. I wanted to make him famous somehow, because in his family nobody cared about him. My dad’s brothers are all financially well-off. Only our family was struggling.I wanted to show everyone that we too can succeed,” he added.
You can follow Village Food Factory on YouTube here and on Facebook here.
