The food-focused docuseries Locals Welcome has helped CBC tap into new audiences and expand its push into the world of social media influencers.

Hosted by food critic and former CBC Radio contributor Suresh Doss, Locals Welcome explores the wide diversity of Canada’s food culture and the communities that make up the nation’s culinary scene.

The format was created by Doss and Toronto-based comedian Rob Baker with L.A.-headquartered studio UltraBoom Media, which was founded by producers Erik Osterholm (Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown) and Michael Simkin (Down to Earth with Zac Efron). UltraBoom owns the format rights.

Locals Welcome premiered on CBC on Oct. 5, with episodes running weekly in its initial 10-episode run, concluding on Dec. 7. Episodes are also available to stream on CBC Gem and YouTube.

Each episode looks at various cultural food spots or communities in Canada, including Nigerian food in the GTA, the Chinese-Canadian food scene in Richmond, B.C., and Toronto’s Filipino food culture.

“The show happened to harmonize with the CBC’s audience development goals, which are largely to connect and communicate with communities that aren’t the regular CBC audience,” Simkin, an executive producer on Locals Welcome, tells Playback Daily. “We’re connecting with [communities] … in a really direct and organic way through food.”

Financing and development

While Simkin is currently based in California, he grew up in Winnipeg. He says when he and Osterholm founded UltraBoom, “it was always a priority for me, personally, to do business in Canada.”

When the company was developing the format concept for Locals Welcome in 2023, it was quickly identified as an ideal project to bring to Canada, and having Doss on board was a “no-brainer.”

The format is talent-dependent, so Locals Welcome was “built specifically around Suresh,” says Simkin. Behind the camera, they needed someone based in Canada to lead the production, which led them to award-winning documentary and unscripted TV producer David York (Gerrie & Louise).

“We had a pre-existing relationship with David … and it was very clear that he, Suresh and Rob [Baker] were the right people for this, so David was the controlling producer on the ground in Canada,” says Simkin.

The team decided to bring the concept to CBC because of Doss’s existing relationship with the public broadcaster as a food columnist for the radio show Metro Morning. They pitched the series in summer 2023, and soon went into development.

Much of the work to get the greenlight involved building a team to make the series a 10/10 show. Toronto-based comedian Ali Hassan is one of three credited writers on the series, alongside Baker and Doss, and is among the show’s Canadian guests, a list that also includes celebrity chef Matty Matheson and fellow comedian Ann Pornel. The production also recruited Canadian directors, including Halifax’s Jim Morrison (You Gotta Eat Here!) and Edmonton’s Alexandra Lazarowich (Still Standing).

“There aren’t a lot of precedents here for, let’s call it, broadly, the Bourdain-type documentary series,” says Simkin. “We needed people who had really good documentary chops, because it’s organically a documentary, but who also had experience making food content.”

Once CBC was on board, they were able to tap into funding from the Canada Media Fund to help finance the series, in addition to the license fee from CBC and the use of tax credits. Financing was rounded out by a distribution commitment from Serial Maven, which is handling distribution for Locals Welcome outside of Canada. (The budget was not disclosed.)

Production and post-production

Locals Welcome was officially greenlit in March 2024 and quickly went into pre-production.

York says the series had a long pre-production process because of its documentary-style format, which required researching the people and settings that would be featured and conducting pre-interviews ahead of production.

“Top of mind for a project like this is really trying to look at [locations] as representative of a certain part of a community, but understanding that it’s more complicated and diverse than that,” says Simkin.

As an example, one episode explores Doss’s hometown of Scarborough, Ont., including its famed shawarma row. “There are so many places seemingly serving the same food, but if you ask the people who frequent those places or the people who run those places, they view them — and now I view them — as very different because they’re all representative of different things, even within the same country or often within different countries,” says Simkin.

He says the production team had a responsibility “to try to get as many voices and to have as deep of an understanding as we possibly can … [knowing] that it’s impossible to really represent everybody.”

The series was shot over 60 days across 2024 and 2025, partially to avoid showcasing the Canadian winter. “We shot loads of interiors in the winter where we were taking people’s coats away from them, and then shooting the exteriors and driving shots when the weather got better,” says York.

Production wrapped in summer 2025, just months before the series’ premiere. York says post-production wrapped in mid-October, a few weeks after the pilot debuted.

“It was a uniquely long schedule … making sure that we were taking our time to get it right,” he adds.

Sales and marketing

CBC has rolled out a robust marketing campaign for Locals Welcome during its run, targeting many of the communities featured in the series.

“I remember very clearly and definitively being on that first marketing call and being so impressed with the creativity, and the commitment to the marketing campaign being an extension of the show,” says Simkin.

The pubcaster hosted two screening events, one at Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Centre Cinemas in Scarborough on Oct. 1, and another at SilverCity Riverport Cinemas in Richmond, B.C., on Oct. 15, debuting the episodes that featured those locations.

“The temptation is always, ‘let’s just throw something big downtown,’ and [instead] there was such a deliberate approach, from the curation side to involving all these great restaurants and highlighting them,” says Simkin.

York says Doss also took content creators and members of the media on food tours to explore some of the locations featured in the series, which he says provided an “enormous amount of social coverage.”

Maya Kane, executive director of CBC marketing and communications, says Locals Welcome “lends itself so well to an influencer strategy, both on the paid and earned [promotion] space, which is something fairly recent that CBC has been doing.”

The strategy included paid posts with food influencers Aileen Christine (@aileenchristineee), Logan (@logansfewd), Pete Early, Bom Bae, Nen (@wpg.foodie) and Deeva Wazir (@deevaandfood). The CBC PR team also created boxes themed around celebrations in some of the communities highlighted in the series, and sent them to a curated list of influencers as a conversation starter for the series and for the use of unboxing videos to build buzz.

Three of the boxes were themed for Nigerian Independence Day, Mid-Autumn Festival and Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas. The fourth was tied to a Filipino tradition called Balikbayan boxes, where family members living overseas send a care package to their loved ones.

CBC also ran paid ads on digital media, including Google and YouTube, as well as on linear TV and connected TV, and the platforms TikTok, Meta, Pinterest and Reddit.

“We’ve heard from some of the creators that this is the first time a big media organization has reached out to them and are engaging with them,” says Kane.

While CBC did not disclose linear ratings, the series has garnered close to 407,000 views on YouTube to date, including over 201,000 for episode two, themed around the South Asian cuisine located near Pearson Airport.

York says the feedback from audiences and talent alike has gotten back to producers as well. “I can’t tell you the number of times when people approached us and said it’s the first time they feel seen and they feel heard, and they had an opportunity to tell their stories.”

Photo by Victor Wong