Blogging is still as popular as it’s ever been, and this is especially true for food blogging. Nowadays, among the countless blogs in the blogosphere, many are about food simply because it’s a very commercial interest. Moreover, if you play your cards right, it can be pretty lucrative.
Food blogging isn’t as easy as you might think. It takes mastering different skills and involves many steps – research, recipe development, food photography, and much more. Besides, you also need a superior blogging platform that can make posting and maintaining a blog manageable (and fun). But, for those who have chosen to turn their passion into a career, these steps are all just a necessary part of the process.
There are many popular food blogs, but some bloggers generate more income than others. So, what sets them apart? Let’s look at the five highest paid food bloggers and how it all started for them, as well as answer some questions about how food bloggers make money.
How Much Money Do Food Bloggers Make?
As with other blogging niches, food bloggers have diverse streams of income that can make them anywhere from $12,000 to $100,000 – and even more – per year. However, according to ZipRecruiter, the average annual pay for a food blogger is around $41,000 as of June 2022.
How Do Food Bloggers Make Money?
Like most bloggers, food bloggers also tend to have diverse revenue streams, such as sponsored content, affiliate links, etc. Not all of them will choose the same combination of revenue streams, though, and some may change the ways they make money with their blog over the years. But mainly, this is how food bloggers make money:
Sponsored content. When food bloggers collaborate with a certain brand, they curate their recipes to feature products from that brand, promoting it on their blog and their social media.
Website ads. Some food bloggers join an advertising network where the network hooks their blog up with advertisers who display ads on the blog.
Affiliate marketing. Bloggers may subscribe to an affiliate marketing program where they post affiliate links from products they use and earn a commission from each purchase.
Products. Some food bloggers progress to writing and publishing cookbooks, meal planners, and various types of branded merchandise, which not only generates income but also gets their name out there and attracts new readers.
Top 5 Highest Paid Food Bloggers
Dana Shultz (Minimalist Baker)
Minimalist Baker is one of the biggest food blogs today. Started by Dana Schultz in 2012, the blog’s trademark is easy and quick meals that use a maximum of ten ingredients, are made in one bowl, and take 30 minutes or less to prepare.
Since its inception, the blog was exclusively focused on vegan or plant-based food, and it was one of the few of its kind that gained a massive audience in the community. However, as the team of Minimalist Baker grew and Dana’s dietary habits changed, since 2019, the blog also features non-vegan recipes. The main premise of Minimalist Baker, however, remained: simple, easy, and quick recipes that “make you feel good.”
Minimalist Baker has a hefty number of recipes, so the blog is optimized for readers to find them by applying filters such as diet, cuisine, ingredient, recipe type, and more. All recipes are marked with different icons representing different dietary needs: vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and naturally sweetened.
The brand of Minimalist Baker has grown so much that the blog itself resembles a website more than it does a blog. You’ll find more than just the recipes – there’s a shop where you can buy some of the affiliate products that the team uses. Dana’s cookbook Minimalist Baker’s Everyday Cooking (2016) is also available, which you can also download as an e-book for free, and there’s a detailed list of resources for starting and running a food blog.
Where Minimalist Baker differs from many other food blogs (and other types of blogs in general) is that they don’t accept free products from brands, and they don’t produce sponsored content as a way of being more authentic and transparent with their readers. Therefore, sponsorships aren’t a part of the team’s income stream (though it used to be in the past).
Having said that, the blog is now self-sufficient enough to be able to afford it and still be one of the highest-paid food blogs.
Deb Perelman (Smitten Kitchen)
Smitten Kitchen was created in 2006 when blogging as a form of content creation was on the rise. But, unlike many other blogs that became passé after a while, Smitten Kitchen continued thriving and is still one of the most followed food blogs.
After trying out a handful of different careers, founder Deb Perelman felt most at home when blogging about what meals she felt like trying out on a given day. She started Smitten Kitchen to talk about delicious and easy recipes made with easily accessible ingredients that anyone can get from the store.
The blog is truly like an encyclopedia, with the recipes organized by anything and everything – from a particular ingredient to a particular occasion or a type of meal. There is a special emphasis on comfort foods, like various upscaled bread and cake recipes, as well as easy-to-follow tutorials. The best part of the blog is the “Surprise Me!” button, where you can click for inspiration when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for.
Deb Perelman is active on all social media. She’s microblogging on Instagram and making videos on TikTok where she has a large audience, but she also posts on Twitter and Facebook and has her own YouTube channel.
Besides blogging on multiple platforms, she has also published two cookbooks, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012), which became a New York Times bestseller, and Smitten Kitchen Every Day (2017). In addition to these, a third cookbook is already on the way!
Lindsay Ostrom (Pinch of Yum)
Pinch of Yum started when founder Lindsay Ostrom wanted to find a better way of sharing her love of food with her friends than spamming them on Facebook. After careful deliberation, Pinch of Yum was born, which marked the start of one of the highest-paid food blogs today.
At the time, Lindsay was working as a primary school teacher and would occasionally blog on some weeknights and weekends. The blog posts were about various recipes she had tried that week, and sometimes some of her own. Slowly but surely, her blog started reaching more and more people, and before she knew it, the readership was big enough to make food blogging a full-time job.
Pinch of Yum features a plethora of different recipes with a variety of ingredients borrowed from various cultures and cuisines. For easier navigation, the recipes are organized by categories, courses, type of diet, season, meal types, method of cooking, ingredient, and series. Each recipe includes nutrition details for readers to know exactly what they’re getting with each meal.
Her blog gained such a large following because she posts many recipes that can cater to diverse tastes. Her recipes are healthy and balanced, “designed for real, actual, everyday life,” as she puts it.
Lindsay’s posts are mostly centered on food, though sometimes she shares snippets of her life, her traveling adventures, and her family. She has a large following on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and she runs her own YouTube channel, where she posts short videos of her recipes.
Chungah Rhee (Damn Delicious)
Damn Delicious didn’t have your typical blogging beginnings. It started as a Tumblr blog in 2011 when founder Chungah Rhee was in grad school and needed to find a fulfilling hobby. So, she started documenting her favorite recipes on this platform, making “less than $0.30 per month,” as she puts it.
Damn Delicious had quite literally one reader, but that didn’t stop Chungah from pursuing her hobby. Her blog eventually became her own registered trademark and the main source of her income, putting her on our list of the highest-paid food bloggers.
Chungah focuses on using simple and fresh ingredients to make easy and elegant meals as an everyday home cook. The recipes are organized in several different categories, including Asian-inspired, to honor her Asian heritage, and dog food recipes, as her two corgis are frequently featured in her social media posts and are a part of the brand. The blog itself is straightforward, and the posts are written in a simple and concise manner with the focus on the instructions and high-res, detailed photos of the food.
Chungah is active on most social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, where she also has a considerably large following, and she posts videos of her recipes on YouTube. She has published two cookbooks so far, Damn Delicious: 100 Super Easy, Super Fast Recipes (2016) and Damn Delicious Meal Prep: 115 Easy Recipes for Low-Calorie, High-Energy Living (2019).
Jeanine Donofrio (Love and Lemons)
Jeanine Donofrio started Love and Lemons while she was working as a graphic designer. Even though she was already working in a creative field, she needed to find another creative outlet as her sanctuary from burnout, and so in 2011, she decided to start blogging about food.
Since Jeanine is a vegetarian, most of the recipes on the blog are vegetarian, made with seasonal plant-based ingredients. Her goal is to inspire readers to not only try a new fruit or vegetable but also to introduce them to all the various ways vegetarian meals can be prepared. Her philosophy is that anyone can enjoy vegetarian food, even if they aren’t vegetarian.
The blog features hundreds of recipes, which readers can filter by meal type, special diet, season, and ingredient. The recipes themselves are well-written and detailed, often with optional variations included and ingredient substitutions. There’s also a shop on the blog where readers can purchase small appliances and kitchen accessories through affiliate links on Amazon as well as the Love and Lemons’ own cookbook planner.
Jeanine is active on most social media platforms and she is also the author of two published cookbooks: The Love and Lemons Cookbook: An Apple-to-Zucchini Celebration of Impromptu Cooking (2016) and Love and Lemons Every Day: More than 100 Bright, Plant-Forward Recipes for Every Meal: A Cookbook (2019).
Over and Out
While food blogging is a competitive niche, there are bloggers who persevere through the years and turn it into a full-fledged profession and a lifestyle – and for them, it pays off. It’s not a small feat to be among the highest-paid food bloggers, especially when it started out as a hobby (as with all the bloggers on our list) and turned into a full-time job. Well, one thing is for certain – there will always be interest in food blogs, especially ones that are determined to stand out!