How Much Does a Food Blogger Make?

Sharing culinary recipes, new dishes you have tried at restaurants or your usual eating habits on social media makes you a food blogger.

You may become a food blogger from your passion for cooking or eating. But what if we say you can earn lucratively by following your passion?

Yeah, you heard that right! Food blogging is today an incredible money-making avenue for anyone with a deep interest in foods and love using social media. Food blogging is fun, especially when you know how to do it and start earning gainfully. Whether it's experimenting with new cuisines at places or making delectable recipes in your kitchen, you get two excellent outcomes – happy tummy and money.
 
So, why not be a food blogger if these criteria suit you? Do you love eating/cooking or both and spend much time scrolling social media? That's it. Leap and nurture these fun sides of yours to make money (and maybe some fame, too!) by being a food blogger.

If that sounds interesting, wait until we disclose how much a food blogger makes! Even though food and cooking are popular and crowded niches, people crave new content. Exploring the niche with creative and fun twists can make you gain followers faster and start earning money.

Are you now ready to become a food blogger? To get on with this new journey of motivation, here we will present some evidence of real food bloggers about their income and the critical ways of earning.

Read ahead.

Who Are Food Bloggers?

To learn about food bloggers, you must first know what food blogging is.

"Food blogging is documenting recipes, authentic food items of regions/nations, dishes of restaurants or cafes, and experimental food items on social media platforms or a website."

In other words, it is a way for people with gourmet interests, also called food enthusiasts, to share their passion for eating.

Given that, a food blogger is a person who documents and shares his food interests with the rest of the world. You can share anything as a food blogger, be it cooking recipes, dishes at various types of dine-outs, regional food exploration, experimental dishes, restaurant reviews, or even your regular food choices.

There's no right or wrong type of content to focus on as a blogger. You need to pick your interest area or super niche (i.e., a niche within the food segment) that you want to focus on for your blogs, and you will be good to go!

Usually, food blogging is done today on various social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Most food bloggers share standard content: cooking recipes, baking, and restaurant tryouts for reviews, exploring authentic and local eateries, food product reviews, and healthy food choices.

Do Food Bloggers Earn?

Of course, they do! Otherwise, we won't be here discussing how much a blogger makes. 

But here's the game. You must start earning later. Wait till you have garnered a sufficient number of followers and engagement rates.

Besides, several factors determine how much food bloggers make, such as specific interest areas, target customers, and products they promote.

While there's no proper estimate of a food blogger's income, there are some estimations we have provided from successful influencers to give you an idea! Whether it's simple cooking, exciting recipes, food photography, or food exploration across regions, you can generate income if you get the right audience as your dedicated subscribers or followers. 

Whatever it is, you can start making money from your food blogging passion or hobby by discovering what others are doing, what your audience likes the most, and sharing content with a creative bent. 
Before you start wondering how much money you can make as a food blogger, let's see what others earn!

How Much Does a Food Blogger Make? Learn From Real-Life Examples!

To push your new aspiration as a food blogger, we will talk about the success stories of bloggers making it big!

If you like and dream of becoming a pro or influencer in the field of cooking and gobbling, you, too, can turn your blog into a sustainable business. With hard work, you can even turn this time-pass activity of yours into a full-time income source.

To make it possible, what you need to maintain in your food blogging technique is consistent dedication and diversification of the content.

It would help if you were consistent with your content posting approach, i.e., follow a particular time or pattern for posting your content. That means if you are posting every day in the evening, make sure to maintain that. Similarly, if you are sharing your cooking recipes, stick to that! Don't suddenly start sharing restaurant reviews or other things related to food. In short, be consistent with super-niche and post regularly.

Also, by diversification, we meant creating a variety of content in your genre by tapping into all the possibilities. For instance, if you regularly post cooking recipes for main course meals, you can share exciting snacks and quick munchies on some days. Sometimes, make dishes from other regions or restaurants at home and share recipes to deviate from your usual meal recipes. On the other hand, if your blog is about reviewing restaurants and cafes, then you can visit tourist locations, remote places, or resorts and check the local dishes offered there.

Thus, keeping these keys in mind will gradually help you gain popularity as a food blogger and fly high.
While that's the main mantra to be successful at food blogging, let's learn how some bloggers have made it huge!

10 Most Popular Food Bloggers' Income

You have many assumptions about a food blogger's pay scale! While some are just practicing their hobby while pursuing a job for a living, a certain percentage of them have successfully turned food blogging into a profitable full-time business.

Here are some highly paid and noteworthy food bloggers who turned their passion or love for food into successful businesses.

1. Tiffy Cooks

This one is the first to mention here. Tiffy, a passionate foodie from Taiwan, started sharing her ordinary culinary journey and wholesome recipes. In no time, she started gaining a name in the food community with her YouTube channel reaching the masses.

From easy-peasy Asian recipes to her husband's weekly lunchbox recipes to nutritious bowls, she has a great deal of culinary expertise, which helps her grow her follower count.

In one of her posts in 2021, she revealed that she earns around $45,000–$55,000 monthly, which is pretty great!

With a mix of easy recipes for family, date nights, holiday dinners, etc., she earns around 1.45 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.8 million followers on Instagram. While she started the journey with her blog site, social media platforms significantly contributed to her total earnings. In that same post, she mentioned that the #1 tip to make money as a food blogger is to diversify the income streams. She is still doing that and channeled her investment into recipe books.

2. The Clean Eating Couple

Liz and Tyler became famous bloggers with significantly different content concepts from other food bloggers. They focused on healthy eating and shared recipes that help people delve into healthy yet tasty food habits.

Through their blog posts, they tried to introduce a different angle to the world of nutrition and were quite successful! From a blog site to a YouTube channel, Instagram, and Facebook to a Pinterest account, they leverage multiple platforms to reach the public and grow as a blogging couple.

From breakfast, snacks, and dinner to desserts and instant pot meals, the couple has expertise in all types of recipes. The best thing about their recipes is that they are simple, easy to make, and healthy, with nutritional ingredients. It made them popular among the masses instantly!

The couple focused more on sponsored content rather than promoting other food or restaurant businesses. Naturally, their revenue streams were different too! They reported in 2019 that they earned around $150,000 in 2 years. This figure has reached another level by now as Liz left her corporate job and started the blog as a full-time job. That means the income from their blog venture was something to rely on for a living!

They started their journey in 2013, just a step towards wellness and healthy eating; we consider this success story exciting and inspiring!

3. Stephanie's Sweet Treats

Stephanie, a vast sweets lover with a knack for baking, started her blog "Stephanie's Sweet Treats." While her journey began as a part of her struggle for health and fitness, the blog gained massive reach as the destination for dessert recipes for many!

She mastered all recipes, from cupcakes to cheesecakes, cookies to no-bake recipes, and cinnamon rolls to bread and donuts. Her well-organized blog and interesting content posts on backing and cooking on Instagram and YouTube reflect that! With easy and new decadent recipes for dessert, Stephanie is an exemplary food blogger with 178K followers on Instagram and 2K on Facebook. She also has an active YouTube page, which is gradually growing.

In her blog, she shared her income report for 2022, which was $128K, to help others know how much a food blogger makes. With that, we estimated her monthly income to be around $8K and $9K. Sounds pretty impressive.

4. The Midwest Foodie Blog

This food blog focuses on simple recipes meant for beginners or new home cooks. That is why it got popular so fast and made headway in food blogging.

Its owner, Kylie – a passionate foodie, photographer, and cook made it clear to share the most straightforward recipes that make feeding family members an easy job! From wholesome dinner meals to winter unique recipes, vegan recipes to dips and sauces, seafood recipes to soups, one-pot meals to flatbreads, and salads to desserts – you get a broad range of recipes at her blog!

With that astonishing variation in her content, she assured her success! Checking out her monthly traffic, expenses, and profits on the blog made us realize where sheer hard work and talent can help you climb the ladder. In the last quarter of 2023, she garnered an income of $142,308, a significant jump from the previous quarter, which was $92,379. Her income level progressed every quarter, affirming how the world loves and appreciates her work.

5. Cookie and Kate

Earnings of food influencers or bloggers might sound unbelievable, but these are pieces of evidence gathered from their feeds or posts. But wait till you hear about Cookie and Kate's income.

Kathryne, known by her nickname, Kate, is a self-taught photographer and an excellent cook. Residing in Oklahoma, she started her food blogging journey much earlier in 2010. Kate named her blog along with her furry friend, Cookie! Nurturing her love or obsession with good foods, she started inventing recipes after reading nutrition and food policy books.

Having a passion for photography, she focused on capturing recipes in impressive frames. Her primary source of income was from the blog site and the YouTube channel that pulled off over 12.6K subscribers. Her Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest successes are remarkable, too, with higher engagement figures!

Currently living in Kansas, Kate works on her blogging job full-time. Don't be surprised when we tell you she earns around $2M - $5M annually!

6. Pinch of Yum

In our in-depth discussion on how much money food bloggers can make, we must mention the success story of 'Pinch of Yum.'

It's a food blog by an impeccable creator and influencer, Lindsay, who belongs to the USA. She started her journey of blogging much earlier in 2010, but it gradually grew into a large-scale business.

With exceptional hard work and a business-oriented mind, she grew her follower count to 1.3 million on Instagram and 54.8K subscribers on YouTube. From simple recipes of everyday meals to vegan dishes, soups, and salads, you see a lot of variation in her content. 

While the website remains her primary source of income, she earns substantially from sponsored content on Instagram. She has worked with incredible brands such as Land of Lakes, Delallo, Wholesome, and Aldi. She also has a thriving Pinterest account with 1.1 Million followers. 

According to the income reports published in her blog, she earns around $22400 from her blog, which is excellent.

7. Bowl of Delicious

Made by aspiring Elizabeth Lindemann from Rhode Island, Bowl of Delicious is a macro-influencer blog with around 9K followers on Instagram. Her YouTube channel has only 540+ subscribers. However, we decided to mention her in this list because she shares a wide range of recipes from scratch, including dinner, seafood, and instant pot recipes.

Her blog presentation is impressive on the website and all other social media platforms. Her content includes long recipe videos, shorts, and sponsored content! Starting her journey in 2014, she aimed to achieve one goal – to share healthy, easy-to-cook recipes for busy people.

However, monetarily, her journey turned out amazing too soon when people loved her recipes so much. In one of her blogs, she didn't disclose the exact amount of her income but stated that she currently makes a six-figure income. She further noted that much of her income comes after switching to advertisements!

8. A Sassy Spoon

A food blog wholly dedicated to Cuban and Latin-inspired dishes is doing great and is another example of profitable food blogger income!

Jamie's story can inspire you if you still determine how to make money from your food blog. A Miami native and an avid photographer, she started blogging for her love for recipe cooking but slowly made it a sustainable business.

With her estimated monthly income of approximately $7K, she is acing the field with multiple sources of revenue. She earns from website ads, brand deals, sponsors, affiliate marketing, etc.

When she created her blog in 2016, she aimed to showcase the unique Cuban recipes she had devoured while growing up. She attracted massive traffic with this idea as people missed Abuela's cooking, craved Cuban comfort food, or were willing to try Cuban dishes found on her blog to be an ultimate stop!

While making the food blogging activity into a full-time job, she started her own office with a cozy kitchen and opened an online kitchen shop on her blog website. Naturally, her income multiplied sooner!

9. Piping Pot Curry

Based in India, Meeta Arora started nurturing her passion for cooking with Piping Pot Curry. Being a foodie, she knows how good food elevates one's mood and helps bond with friends and family.

She firmly believed everyone has some culinary skill embedded in them, and she thought to help people bring them out through her food blog. While she started slowly with minimal followers, she gradually gained an overwhelming response on her blog and social media profiles.

Her Instagram account holds over 55K followers, and her YouTube channel has 13K subscribers. With that said and done, she earns her income from blogs, ad runs, and affiliate marketing.

According to some reports 2018, she made approximately $5,110 per month, which was great then. We presume her monthly income has increased by manifolds since she started diversifying her content with recipe guides and sponsored kitchen products.

10. RecipeTin Eats

Last but not least, we must attend RecipeTin Eats in this discussion about how much a food blogger makes. Created by Nagi Maehashi, a resident of Sydney, she started this blog to nurture her philosophy on food and culinary.

Starting with a simple food blog, she has come a long way, with 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 584K subscribers on her YouTube channel.

If you are looking for some authentic Vietnamese and Asian cuisines, her blog will amaze you! She focuses on creative and fresh ideas for recipes made quickly and with minimal ingredients. Here's the main twist about her blogs - she makes all ingredients from scratch, including the sauces, which makes her recipes cost-conscious and healthy!

With her approach, she is making a great deal of revenue, approximately 1 million a year. From having the best-earning food blog to getting New York Times Best Seller and Australian Book of the Year awards for her debut CookBook, her story is a testament to her hard work!

How Do Food Bloggers Make Money? 6 Effective Ways They Are Doing It!

Our various success stories have given you an idea of how much money food bloggers can make. But, if that made you wonder how you can start earning with your food blog, we can guide you.

Before discussing, remember that diversifying your income sources is critical to making money through food blogging. Don't just rely on your blog site or just any of the platforms like YouTube or Instagram. There are several platforms and ways to make money if only you know how to harness their potential.

Look at the most prominent revenue streams to make money as a food blogger.

Run website ads

Being a food blogger, the most indispensable source of income will be website ads! It's also called monetizing the traffic to your blog site.

This is how it works.

Businesses or brands related to your niche, i.e., food, will display ads on your website. The ads can be placed at the bottom, sideways, or across the web page.

While it's a straightforward way to earn money from your blog site, you need to choose which way or ways to run the ads. From Google Adsense, Banner Ads, Floating Ads, and Video Ads to Pop-ups ads, there are many options to advertise other companies on your website.

Of all these, Google Adsense is the most popular form of website advertisement, where Google does all the work. After analyzing your niche, it will serve your site with contextual ads relevant to your blog. In the other forms of ads, usually, the advertisers or brands buy a space on your website.

Popular brands or companies advertising their products or services on your website will increase your traffic and overall engagement. You can earn money from the advertisers and improve the quality and quantity of your web traffic.

Go for affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective strategies if you want to know how to make money quickly as a food blogger! 

It is a commission-based marketing strategy under which a website or brand promotes its products on your blog, and you get paid for that. They ask you to mention a link to a product on your blog post, and any customer you send to the product page is a lead. For instance, you said a fine vegetable cutter in a recipe on your blog and linked that to the product page (i.e., on Amazon or an online store).

You will earn a percentage of the sales the company makes from the leads you send to the store from your blog.

It is a whole new way of profitable marketing your food blog that only requires you to do some work. However, it is not a stable source of income because you cannot be sure that every visitor will click on the link.

Joining up for affiliate marketing is easy, too. You must join the Amazon affiliate program or any marketing company like Gen3 Marketing and ClickBank.

Sponsored content for more exposure

Once your food blog starts gaining popularity, it's time to leverage the revenue potential of sponsored content.
 
Sponsored content differs from dedicated blogs describing a product, providing links to promote other brands, or collaborating with brands on Instagram posts or tweets. If you own a YouTube channel, you can have sponsorship segments and create videos dedicated to brands.

Sponsored content is one of the recommended ways to monetize social media, and the audience will never feel like you are pushing a brand's product in your content. Since you will only promote products related to your content, it will feel natural to them.

For instance, you can post about feeding your kids snacks and take advantage of the situation by advertising instant ready-to-cook pasta or noodles. To give it a fresh appeal and your touch, you added some toppings and served it in an impressive porcelain bowl and cutleries of a brand (advertising that too as a kitchen essential!).

That's how you can make a sponsored blog or social media content that looks natural. Since it is a significant source of income, most food bloggers monetize using sponsored posts. However, it needs a lot of dedication and hard work because you create fresh content for the brand while highlighting its products or services.

Sell cookbooks for additional income.

If you peek at the works of a few successful bloggers we mentioned earlier, you will know how much a food blogger makes by selling cookbooks of their recipes.

Cookbooks are a highly sustainable source of income as most people still like handy books to keep in their kitchen drawer and read out a recipe before cooking! If you specialize in a particular narrower niche, the chances of gaining profits by selling cookbooks are higher. Naturally, you get a lot of attention from the readers because your recipes are unique!

So, going for cookbook publishing is an ideal way to generate income as a food blogger only when you love developing unusual and lip-smacking recipes.

You can arrange to publish your recipe book or cookbook and let your followers get all the recipes in one place. You never know; with the most exciting recipes in your book, you can bag offers from great publishing houses and even become one of the best-sellers like RecipeTin Eats.

Get eBooks published on popular sites.

If getting publishers or publishing the cookbook yourself seems challenging, you still have an option. Sell your specially curated cookbook as an eBook on your blog or other third-party websites like Amazon or Etsy.

eBooks are popular and in demand, with sales escalating in the last few years. Even if you offer free eBooks, you can request a subscription to your channel in return for free download to the readers. Getting your eBook distributed fast to different demographies and regions while increasing your subscribers or followers count is tricky.

Creating an eBook from your content is much easier nowadays as there are several online eBook creators. While it may be time-consuming if you have 100 recipes or more to share, the results are worth it.

When you offer paid eBooks, you'll receive money for every download, a great passive income for your blog. However, you need to pay a minimal transaction fee to an online platform like Amazon through which you are selling your eBook.

Go for real-time interaction through cooking classes or online courses.

It is a subsequent activity that most influencers are doing today after tasting success as a food blogger. After many of their followers or subscribers requested them, they started providing online courses or real-time cooking classes.

As an established food blogger who excels at developing new recipes, starting cooking classes can be a rewarding experience as you get a chance to interact with followers. Through those interactive classes, you can also share essential cooking techniques, home cooking hacks, and nutrition facts. Many times, it's not possible to transfer all facts in detail on your social media posts, so taking classes will be a fulfilling experience for you.

The more valuable information you share, the better the chance of selling your online courses or making your cooking classes popular. It is the most effective option to grow your traffic if your website needs more. By promoting virtual classes or face-to-face cooking classes, your blog gets much-needed exposure as it increases the credibility and reliability of your blog!

Besides, you can earn substantial extra income by offering virtual courses or physical classes. So, why not?

You need a spacious, bright kitchen to shoot for online classes or accommodate your learners! If you have established your name as a food blogger and are known for your varying recipes, this supplementary monetization strategy is a must-try.

Sell merchandise products of your brand.

If your follower count has grown vast enough, utilize the situation to the fullest by selling merchandise products, especially personalized ones.

There are two ways to sell merchandise to your followers or the general public. You can partner with brands selling products from your niche, like kitchen accessories, clothing, bags, etc.

Another way is to create your brand identity for your blog and sell products under that brand name. Your merchandise can be anything from mugs, bottles, and t-shirts to aprons, tote bags, and kitchen accessories.

While the partner brands will handle all your order deliveries in the first case, you need to receive and take every order by yourself and deliver them with the help of drop-shipping facilities in the latter case. You have to source essential items from local suppliers, such as T-shirts, mugs, aprons, etc., and get the designs and texts imprinted on them with your ideas and creativity. To make them more interesting, you can get the designs done by a creative artist or professional with a flair for designing merchandise items.

Make money from shoppable recipes.

You can be surprised to know how much a food blogger makes by selling shoppable recipes.

Shoppable recipes appeared during and after the pandemic when grocery brands and retail companies like Walmart invaded food blogging platforms. They asked bloggers to introduce and directly sell cooking essentials and ingredients in their recipes.

To sell the items, you must add specific plugins that enable the creation of shoppable recipe cards and the Buy Now/Add to Cart button on every shoppable ingredient or equipment.

This food blog monetization works quite similarly to using affiliate links on your blog. The only difference is that here, you provide a direct buying option to the readers while the affiliate links take them to the product's site or online store where they can buy.

This option lets your readers buy the entire list of ingredients and equipment used in the recipe. While they will deliver their items at the right time, you can have a compelling proportion of the sales as commission.

Host live events whenever possible

Food bloggers with a considerable follower base can get their events to offline platforms and make money. It's mainly a win-win strategy when the blogger has grown their identity as a personal brand, and people know them well! Eventually, you can grow your food blog into a personal brand with time.

Bloggers with a vast follower base will draw a sizeable audience to live events, making them a grand hit. While you will get some direct earnings by selling tickets to the event with a sponsor, you also get substantial authentic followers from the event who didn't know about your blog earlier. 

Some examples of live events that will help you earn money and get fame locally are food festivals, restaurant buffets or carnivals, cooking competitions, or live cooking demonstrations.

The result will be the same whether you host such events or invite yourself to other events! You get a long list of followers from the live social event and substantial earnings from the ticket sales.

It's Time to Start Earning as a Food Blogger with Privy Reviews!

Whether you've started your food blog for the passion of cooking and eating or you love to share your healthy eating journey with others, why not utilize your blog to earn money?

After all, you have seen how affluently popular food influencers or bloggers like Tiffy Cooks and A Sassy Spoon are earning nowadays. They all started their journey from nowhere, but their success stories are extraordinary. With many of them turning this free-time blogging activity into a full-time job by setting up an office or studio, it has left you wondering how much money food bloggers can make or what their revenue potential is!

Well, there are miscellaneous streams of revenue to earn for food influencers. Here, we discussed a few of the most profitable ones, like website ads, affiliate links, sponsored content, cookbooks, and merchandise. You can even host live events and conduct online cooking classes to facilitate real-time interactions with your followers and gain a follower base.

If our comprehensive blog has helped you understand how much a food blogger makes, it's time to turn your new blog into a sustainable income with us. Privy Reviews is a pioneering review platform for content creators and influencers. Make yourself recognized as a featured creator by joining our Privy community, asking your followers to review your food blog, and getting your audiences growing in no time!