When Erin Antoniak quit her job at a software company to pursue full-time food blogging in May 2018, she gave herself a year.
If Erin Lives Whole didn’t find success in that time, she pledged to herself, she’d use her public relations degree to get another job. She was 24 then, still living at her parents’ Montgomery County home after graduating from college.
Within a year, her Instagram had 40,000 followers. Today, it has about 517,000, with even more people flocking to her website for healthy yet approachable recipes, such as hot honey tortellini salad, cranberry turkey meatballs, breakfast croissant casserole, and buffalo chicken enchiladas.
“It’s been beyond my wildest dreams,” said Antoniak, who is now 32 and living in Point Breeze with her husband and 8-month-old son. “It’s pretty insane how the internet can be someone’s full-time job.”
And it can be quite a lucrative one: Antoniak said she usually makes more than $300,000 a year, about six times what she earned in the corporate world.
In Williamstown, N.J., Larisha and Andrew Bernard make a solid six-figure salary, too — enough to support themselves and two young daughters — by sharing “mouthwatering vegan recipes” on their two food blogs, The Nard Dog Cooks and Make It Dairy Free.
Recipe-developing content creators usually make the lion’s share of their money from website ads, with earnings proportional to the number of page views. That means the holiday season, especially the day before Thanksgiving, is particularly profitable. Bloggers who post über-healthy recipes can also see a boost in January, thanks to New Year’s resolutions.
Some creators bring in additional income by partnering with brands on social media or selling cookbooks.
But the money, they say, doesn’t come easy.
At a time when there are more ways than ever to make extra cash on the internet, the region’s recipe-developing content creators say they have to work nonstop to make a career out of their online passion projects. Several recipe influencers with whom The Inquirer spoke estimated that they work as many as 70 hours a week running their food blogs and social media accounts.
“I work all the time,” Antoniak said, between recipe testing, video editing, and other tasks. “I answer thousands of DMs [direct messages] a week. My screen time is unbearable. I’m constantly thinking, ‘I need to share another reel.’”
» READ MORE: These Philly-area residents bring in hundreds of dollars a month selling stuff online. Here’s how.
Homegrown cooking skills add to the appeal
Like Antoniak, many online recipe developers aren’t professionally trained.
They learned to cook from parents or grandparents, or honed baking skills during classes at local craft stores. Often, they trace their journey’s start to the era of physical cookbooks, before endless dinner ideas were a Google search away.
These influencers say their lack of official culinary experience is part of the appeal.
“Most people who like to bake are not classically trained. They just want to have a really good chocolate chip cookie recipe,” said Lynn April, 39, who runs Fresh April Flours out of her West Chester home and has perfected the art of the sweet staple.
“My chocolate chip cookies took off,” she said. “They’ve gone viral on Instagram more times than I can count.”
April and her team of contractors are working to get the mix into more people’s hands, with plans to sell it on her website and perhaps even on third-party sites like Amazon. This would be another revenue stream for April, who makes money off website advertising, a few brand partnerships, and the sales of her three self-published cookbooks.
She’s still amazed by the demand for her recipes. When April launched her website in 2014, she said she didn’t view it as a way to make money. It was simply a place to post the cakes and cupcakes she had sold through a side business she operated out of her home from 2010 to 2013.
She was working full-time in an immunology lab at the time, and baking had become “my science away from my full-time science,” April said.
By summer 2019, she and her husband had two small children and were running their gym, Bent on Better, all while April worked full-time and ran Fresh April Flours. Something had to give, April recalled thinking. So she took a risk, quitting her immunology job and taking on recipe blogging full-time.
It paid off, despite the early challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, which brought elevated interest in home baking but a decline in advertisers’ budgets.
“When I quit my job, I was making just under $60,000, and my website made $30,000 that year,” April said. “My hope was that in 2020 I could at least replace that income, which I did in 2020, and it has grown since then. … It has replaced my income and then some.”
Some recipe creators share more than food
Making a living online comes with unique challenges.
Bloggers must stay up to date with the ever-changing intricacies of social media platforms, which control what posts are seen by users via secretive algorithms. At the same time, influencers are constantly gauging users’ desires and concerns.
At Make It Dairy Free, Larisha and Andrew Bernard, 39 and 38 respectively, follow economic trends. “A lot of people are worried about money, so we might right now be trying to push more budget-friendly recipes,” Larisha said.
The couple said they try, too, to make recipes — such as chickpea curry and vegan chocolate cake — attractive to vegans and non-vegans, which make up about 40% of their followers.
Others have broadened their appeal by sharing non-recipe-related content.
Antoniak, of Erin Lives Whole, said her platform has become “part lifestyle blog.”
On Instagram, she regularly shares snippets of her daily life — latte orders at local coffee shops; walks with her son, Rhys, and golden retriever, Coconut; and recaps of weekends spent going to Phillies games, visiting family, and dining with friends at popular Philly restaurants.
She also has opened up about personal struggles. She has shared her experience surviving and recovering from an eating disorder in college. In recent years, she has documented her journey with infertility and the birth of Rhys.
Sharing so much of herself online has brought Antoniak “incredible joy,” she said. She prides herself on being the same person in real life that her fans see online.
“People really can relate to someone else sharing a struggle,” Antoniak said. “I know personally that I have felt really connected to people online who have shared stuff like that.”
When people recognize her on the street, she said they often say hi and compliment her recipes. Other times, however, they say she made them feel less alone during a hard time.
Dining and Cooking