The Move
Minnesota PBS is expanding the hosting structure of its flagship food series Relish for Season 7, bringing on two co-hosts for the first time in the show's run. St. Paul chef Karyn Tomlinson and Rochester-based food storyteller Tiffany Alexandria will share the helm when the season premieres Spring 2027. For operators, food brands, and regional suppliers watching how food media shapes consumer discovery in secondary markets, the dual-host model signals a deliberate editorial expansion beyond the Twin Cities corridor.
Why Operators Should Watch
Tomlinson is the chef-owner of Myriel in St. Paul, a restaurant built around Midwestern ingredients filtered through French technique and Minnesota culinary heritage. Her presence anchors the series in the state's established chef community. Alexandria counterbalances that with deep community-level reach: she founded the Rochester Night Market, runs pop-up dinners and dumpling classes, and uses food as a vehicle for Taiwanese cultural storytelling and cross-cultural connection. Together the two hosts cover opposite ends of the foodservice spectrum — fine-dining craft and grassroots community food enterprise — which meaningfully widens the series' potential to surface emerging suppliers, regional producers, and independent operators who have historically been undercovered by food media.
For food and beverage brands with regional distribution in Minnesota, placement or feature adjacency in a PBS food series carries a different audience signal than social media or influencer channels. Public television food programming attracts an audience that skews toward intentional food purchasing, local sourcing interest, and household cooking investment — a profile that aligns well with specialty food brands, farmers market suppliers, and restaurant-adjacent CPG products. Operators in Rochester and Greater Minnesota, in particular, may find the Alexandria lens a meaningful media avenue as the series expands coverage beyond the metro.
Intelligence for Brands and Vendors
The structural choice to add a second host also reflects a broader pattern in regional food media: single-narrator formats are giving way to ensemble or co-host structures that allow producers to cover more geographic and cultural ground per season without proportionally increasing episode count. Brands evaluating earned media and brand launch strategies for regional markets should note that community-anchored programming — particularly on PBS — often outperforms paid digital in building durable brand trust with older millennial and Gen X food buyers. Meanwhile, suppliers and foodservice distributors tracking operator intelligence trends in the Upper Midwest should monitor how Relish's expanded coverage footprint influences consumer awareness of independent restaurants and specialty ingredients in mid-size Minnesota markets like Rochester, Austin, and Duluth.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
