Naomi MacRae walked up to the cashier in the Barrie Dollarama to purchase a few items for a party, and the cashier gasped in shock.
“Oh,” she said. “I know you. You’re … you’re ...”
“I eat stuff,” MacRae nodded.
“Yes,” the cashier squealed, “You’re HunniBee!”
As far as jobs go, MacRae’s takes the cake.
The 29-year-old is rich. She is famous. And she gets to eat for a living.
The Innisfil resident has made it big as a social media influencer and ASMR celebrity. Some would say it’s a dream career, but MacRae had to go through some dark days to get there.
For those who aren’t familiar, ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response.
Search the term online and you’ll find a mystifying mix of “visual and auditory triggers” — someone whispering or humming, for example, or working with slime, cutting soap, typing on keyboards or, increasingly, eating food (known as ‘muckbang’).
For some, it causes a tingling feeling or goosebumps; for others, it relaxes them or helps them sleep.
MacRae found her way to this obscure but growing field in a roundabout way, beginning with a stint studying art fundamentals at Sheridan College.
School, she says, wasn’t for her; she dropped out within six months.
Next, she tried to get into an animation program. Teachers said she showed great promise, but that didn’t work out, either.
She tried a different tack: pursuing fitness in a big way. She became a national-level bodybuilder and personal trainer, and then, to add to the fun, she studied fashion at George Brown College.
That, she says, was “insane.”
“I was basically waking up at 4 a.m., going to the gym for 4:30, 5-ish. I’d do my fasted cardio, then eat my breakfast on the GO train and go to Toronto for class at eight or 8:30,” she recalls.
After class, she’d take the GO train home, hit the gym to do her lifting, and then go to bed for more of the same the next day.
“It was too much for me.”
After six months, she dropped out.
Dark days followed.
“I developed this crazy binge-eating disorder and actually kind of ruined my life,” she says. “I literally put on 100 pounds … pushed away all my friends, my family, everything. I lost everyone for maybe two, three years.
“I was just literally at the lowest point in my life.”
In despair, she signed on to attend a Christian school in California, which turned out to be one of the best decisions she says she’s ever made.
“It was literally amazing,” she says. “Learning more about yourself and your relationship with God, it was super healing.”
Then came the “prophetic word” — something she admits sounds crazy but was life changing.
Someone at the school asked her, “Have you heard of YouTube? I’m hearing from God. You need to do that.”
He predicted she would have a massive following.
She mentioned the bizarre comment to her parents, who were surprisingly open to the idea.
“If you were to do a channel, what would it be?” they asked her.
MacRae knew the answer.
Since high school, she had been watching ASMR videos.
She didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, and she didn’t tell anyone because “it was kind of weird,” but when she watched people do their makeup online, it was strangely relaxing and helped her fall asleep.
She discovered gentle whispering videos affected her this way, too.
“I was obsessed with it, so when my parents asked me what I was passionate about, I said I’d like to do that. I felt like it would help people.
“They said, ‘Go for it.’ My parents have always been super supportive.”
She began to research, buying the best microphone she could find on the internet and an adapter for her phone, and shot her first video by herself, in her room in Eureka, Calif.
That was six years ago, and that video, with its random, meandering monologue in a whispery voice, still draws fans to her YouTube channel.
“It’s pretty embarrassing,” she laughs, “and funny.”
Maybe. But it hit 5,000 followers in the first week.
MacRae was hooked. She taped some more: whispering, role plays, tapping — the traditional kind of activities other ASMR YouTubers were posting.
After a year of doing this as a hobby, she was getting decent views — 15,000, 20,000, sometimes 100,000 — making $100 to $150 per month.
Still, it wasn’t enough to pay the bills.
She searched online to find out what videos people viewed most. Turns out, anything food related got the eyeballs.
And that’s how she turned to her specialty: eating edible creations in colourful, crazy, eye-catching style, an artsy version of muckbang.
Her first attempt, in April 2019, earned almost five times as many views as her previous work.
The dish sponge she ate on camera was “literally the most delicious thing.”
“I did a low-carb, low-sugar thing, which is a lot of what we do now. (Otherwise, I would literally be like a trillion pounds).”
She made a keto cake, dyed yellow, made a green gelatin sheet for the top, and filled a dishwashing soap container with thick juice to look like detergent.
“I cracked my first one million views within four or five days. It was my first crazy-viral video.”
Watching the view numbers tick upwards was intoxicating, “the most riveting thing of my entire life. It’s addictive.”
And as the numbers grew, so did her revenue.
“I don’t think I slept, I just had to make the next thing. So, I made edible hairbrushes.”
There’s no DIY for this kind of thing; MacRae made it up as she went.
She bought cheap brushes from the dollar store with the middle cut out and replaced with Rice Krispies mix, raw spaghetti noodles dyed black to form the bristles.
The brush-eating video went viral, too.
Friends contacted her.
“Oh, my gosh. You’re on my Snapchat Discovery page!”
She went on to make, and eat, edible AirPods and iPads, Instax cameras, whatever was a trending product, spending almost as much time researching for her next video — looking at algorithms, working out timing for uploading — as filming.
In three months, she jumped from 100,000 subscribers to one million.
A video in which she ate McDonald’s food earned her 30 million views, she says.
Each month, there were more views — five million in five days, 20 million in more than a month. Many times, she was one of the top trending on YouTube. Podcast celebrities were asking her if they could review her videos.
She was featured in international media as the Canadian woman making $1 million a month “chewing.”
So, who are these viewers?
HunniBee’s analytics say they are aged 18 to 34, most in the U.S. and Brazil, 70 per cent female with a lot of moms and their kids.
“People think ASMR whispering is a sexual thing, but … my channel is so pure. Little kids to teens are my main audience.”
Now she has a professional baker on staff, companies and brands seeking to work with her and discussing possible collaborations.
“My world just opened up,” she says.
What’s HunniBee’s secret to success?
MacRae’s husband, Matt Macausland, who assists with the business, has a theory.
“She’s hilarious. People relate to her because she’s real,” he says. “They’re used to seeing influencers and ‘look how great my life is.’ She’s not trying to be hot. There’s mustard on her face. Whatever. She can laugh at herself.”
Looking back, MacRae and Macausland say there was no great investment, just great enthusiasm.
It is, they say, a lesson in finding your passion and simply going for it.
“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Macausland says. “At the end of the day, my wife just eats cake on camera.”
