From a Camden Market stall to a Colombian cult following

Maize Blaze is a Colombian street food brand founded in 2014 by Ruth Christianson, inspired by her childhood in Bogotá and trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Ruth started from a stall in Camden Market and has since added a kitchen residency at Howling Hops in Hackney Wick and a Colombian brunch in Bristol.

The signature is the Marching Box: chicken, chorizo, paprika potatoes, plantain, rice, beans and guac. Or the Lean Mean Vegan Machine. Or the sweet chilli plantains as a side. Creators find the colour first, then the flavour.

As a small business, marketing time was always the constraint. Maize Blaze partnered with Joli to run creator campaigns without the overhead. Creators now produce content every week from London’s Camden Market stall, extending the reach of one of the capital’s most distinctive street food brands.

With Joli because you can manage it yourself. And because it is on a platform and influencers are basically doing the work for you. It just keeps (marketing) costs down quite a lot.

And it’s really easy to manage cause I can do it on my phone and I can also get the alert sent out to the team. So I don’t even have to tell them when it’s happening.

I just put in exactly what I want to offer, what the minimum number of followers would be for that particular offer. And then they find me and I just click approve, which is amazing! Saves me a lot of time.

Ruth Christianson, Owner