Top Chef Launches Healthy Choice Entrees Online

If you’re craving some Top Chef and are tired of rereading Eater’s delightful recaps of installments of Top Chef by the very funny Max Silvestri, but still want to satiate your entertainment pangs for reality culinary competitions before the November 2 premiere of Top Chef: Season Nine’s multi-platform programming, you can tune into BravoTV.com. That’s where you’ll find the ConAgra-sponsored original web series Top Chef: Healthy Showdown.

The half-dozen-or-so-episode original web series features one of Padma’s favorites and three other past contestants – Sara Nguyen of Season Three, Ryan Scott of Season Four, and Casey Thompson and Tre Wilcox of Season Three and Top Chef All-Stars – cooking for celebrity chef Curtist Stone, the Judge’s Table, a shot at $25,000, and the opportunity to become the “Flavor Ambassador” for Healthy Choice’s new brand of Top Chef-endorsed products.

The episodes are shorter than their television counterparts, but aside from the time and the underlying calorie conscious theme, Healthy Showdown looks and feels just like any installment of Top Chef you’d find on Bravo proper. The sereis should be a good representation of what’s to expect from the online Loser’s Bracket component of Top Chef‘s upcoming season.

This also isn’t the first original web series of which ConAgra has been a major sponsor. Two years ago the packaged foods company backed Yahoo’s online original What’s So Funny? in a very big way. Last year ConAgra Foods Canada produced the meta comedy Life Unjarred, about a stay-at-home dad who gains interent fame by having his son film his VH Sauces-inspired kitchen hijinks and uploading the videos to the internet.