Food Blogs: Definition, Types, Income & 25 Examples [2022]

Ever looked up a recipe online to find that you end up on a website with a random name rather than someone’s cookbook?

Food blogs offer readers a way to access delicious recipes and kitchen tips without having to shell out for a cookbook or make a call to a relative for help.

But, what if you want to start one of these yourself?

What steps would you have to take to achieve that goal?

It turns out that starting a food blog isn’t all that different from most other types of blogs with the right know-how.

What Is a Food Blog?

Food blogs are a written medium meant to help those who love food connect with other like-minded folks through written stories, recipes, and pictures.

Most food blogs start as a website dedicated to one facet of food and eventually grow into something larger.

What Does a Food Blogger Blog About?

Food bloggers generally select a niche or focus for their blogs.

Some blogs commit to providing or creating new recipes, while others report on restaurants and services through reviews and guides.

So long as the topic relates to food, someone is probably blogging about it right now!

What Is Included on a Food Blog?

Food blogs focus on content about food regardless of their niche or style.

However, a successful food blog has all five of the following elements.

1. Clean Home Pages

If readers can’t navigate the website, they will leave and never come back.

Popular food blogs keep their home pages clean and organized so that new readers can search for what they want to find.

Part of what helps create this appearance is a clear and simple color scheme.

2. Guides or Recipes

Not all food blogs post recipes, but almost all of them post guides of some kind.

Recipes will help guide you through certain types of dishes.

Other blogs focus on guides for specific culinary techniques generally related to the blog’s niche.

3. A Menu

The blog may not call it a menu, but most food blogs have a way they sort their recipes and guides.

The ability to search for types of dishes by region or ingredients shows up on blogs with a large amount of content.

This feature helps new readers find what they want if the recipe doesn’t show up on the home page.

4. Reviews

Most blogs review companies, products, and services for their audiences.

These reviews help readers understand how a product or service might work for them.

Plus, reviews can lead to affiliate marketing opportunities if the blogger believes the service is a good one after their review.

5. Pictures

All of the above types of content will use pictures to help readers visualize the food.

We eat with our eyes first, so having a picture of the food helps you see if it’s a dish that would interest you as a reader!

Other Things You Can Find on a Food Blog

While the above bits show up on all food blogs, some other elements aren’t necessary but are good for food blogs to have.

• About Us Pages: Most blog readers want to know about the person or company behind the website. About Us pages give bloggers a way to show who they are to their readers and prove their expertise and passion.
• Social Media Links: Social media plays a big role in notifying readers when new content comes out or sharing good content from the blog. Most food blogs have plugins that handle adding social media links for each article or recipe.
• Shop Pages: Food blogs monetize through multiple ways, one of which is an online shop. These pages tend to display branded merchandise and partnered or affiliate goods that help the blog make money through readers purchasing the items in the shop.
• Other Forms of Content: Many food bloggers dip into other types of content. Podcasts, video content, and other types of blogs show up on food blogs sometimes as a way for the blogger to share their content with other parts of the internet.  

Types of Food Blogs

Not all food blogs are the same. They occupy different spaces depending on what the focus of their content is.

• Food Blogs for Restaurants: Some restaurants run a blog as a way to keep their website active and relevant to search engines. These blogs also help restaurants show how they stand out from the other eateries in the area. Since a restaurant blog is part of the restaurant’s business, more than one person may run the blog.
• Food Blogs for Healthy Food: Many folks want to eat better, so they go searching for healthy recipes. These blogs help readers learn more about the right combinations of foods to eat or offer diets that could help such as blogs about paleo diets.
• Food Blogs for Food Delivery: Food delivery services, such as Uber Eats and DoorDash, have become a big part of how folks get their food. Blogs that cover the best rates and deals for these services provide helpful information for those strapped for time or that enjoy the convenience of food delivery.
• Food Blogs for Baking: Making desserts, bread and other oven treats is a fun and delicious pastime. Many blogs focus on these food items to help readers work through the steps to make these treats and also recommend technique tips and equipment to make the job easier.
• Food Blogs for Cooking: On the other end, you can find savory dishes and sides from all over the world on many food blogs. Most blogs peg themselves to a niche or theme of recipes, meaning blogs about cooking can range widely in the ingredients and techniques they use to create the dishes they feature.

Do Food Blogs Make Money?

The truth of the matter is that bloggers can make good money.

However, it might not always be obvious how much a blogger makes or how they make this money.

How Do Food Blogs Make Money?

Most food blogs earn their money through a combination of passive strategies like advertisements and affiliate marketing.

Readers who click on ads or affiliate links on the blog page and purchase products can help food bloggers earn money.

Still, there are other active strategies food bloggers can take, such as offering freelance services or creating classes and merchandise.

Each of these methods provides food bloggers with streams of income.

How Much Do Food Blogs Make?

Food blogs don’t have a guaranteed amount that they make each year.

Most income options for blogs require regular readers and buyers, meaning a blog’s income depends on higher reader totals.

The average blogger makes under $40,000 per year, displaying how much effort has to go into earning money with a blog.  

Products to Promote and Sell On a Food Blog

There are many different types of blogs that make money using products.

Most often, these products come from affiliate marketing deals where the blogger promotes a brand or service in exchange for a commission from the deal provider.

For most food bloggers, these products include kitchenware or other kitchen accessories.

Many food bloggers claim to use the tools they recommend to their readers, with the good ones out there meaning it.

Otherwise, home meal or ingredient delivery services tend to cost a monthly subscription, which the blogger receives a portion of as their commission.

Best Food Blogs: 25 Examples

To get some inspiration for your food blog, it helps to look at the top performers out there and see what they do to achieve their success.

While copying directly won’t work out well, you can use these blogs as inspiration to explore the food blogging space.

Food Blogs for Restaurants

Many blogs dedicated to restaurants focus on reviews, guides, and industry news for those in the hospitality sector.

The Restaurant Manifesto

Restaurant Manifesto is a blog that helps provide some insight into what it’s like to work in a restaurant.

In doing so, they hope that readers will better understand how to approach and talk with wait staff the next time they go out to eat.

The articles are insightful, well-written, and go into a lot of detail about what things are like behind the host counter.

Grub Street

To get the word on trends, news, and up-and-coming places in Ney York City, Grub Street covers that info like no one else.

Their thumbnail art style is iconic when hand-drawn and offers solid information every time.

Restaurant Hospitality

To help support the independent restaurant owners that make up a majority of the institutions out there, Restaurant Hospitality is a magazine-style blog meant to help restaurant owners keep up with the current trends.

The organization goes back over 100 years, meaning their blog is only one part of their brand.

RestaurantNews.com

If you need to know about new items and restaurants opening in your area, RestaurantNews.com covers that info.

They take press releases from anywhere across the United States to deliver to readers as quickly as possible.

Their goal is to help foodies learn about independent places popping up in their area.

Modern Restaurant Management

Modern Restaurant Management covers topics to restaurant administration, marketing, and other facets of the business.

Catering to restaurant owners, this blog helps owners stay on top of changes in administration tools and trends to help make the process of running their business easier.

Food Blogs for Healthy Foods

Health food blogs tend to focus on recipes and nutrition information so that readers know what they should or shouldn’t eat to stay fit.

Some of the best examples of these blogs are:

Real Food Real Deals

By looking at foods that are real, easy, affordable, and flavorful, Annemarri Rosie of Real Food Real Deals helps folks create meals that won’t break the bank or inflate the waistline.

The recipes are easy to follow along and span all three meals of the day.

Cleverfull Living

Holley Grainger of Cleverfull Living is a registered dietician who provides, simple, healthy recipes for everyday meals.

She often makes suggestions in her recipes that help reduce time and effort for busy parents so that they can get back to spending time with family.

Mama Knows Nutrition

Speaking of nutrition and kids, Mama Knows Nutrition is another health food blog focused on nutrition for kids.

In addition to the recipes on the blog, several guides are talking about the nutrition needs of babies and kids for parents to look at.

These guides help parents understand what foods to provide for their children.

Grateful Grazer

With vegan diets, understanding the nutrients you need to stay healthy with just plants is important.

The Grateful Grazer offers not just healthy vegan recipes for their readers, but also researched articles about vegan nutrition and how to obtain those nutrients.

The Spunky Coconut

For those looking to avoid gluten, refined sugar, or casein, The Spunky Coconut is a well-written blog that offers plenty of substitute recipes for items with these ingredients.

Those of the paleo diet will appreciate not just the recipes, but also the natural products recommended in the lifestyle section of the blog.

Food Blogs for Food Delivery

With many restaurants relying on delivery apps to bring food to their customers, it’s not a surprise some folks out there want to talk about these platforms.

Here are some of the better folks to get inspired from:

Ameribites

Ameribites has a blog that covers a lot of questions folks have about modern food delivery.

If you need to know how much to tip a delivery driver or why things moved to the mobile app delivery model, Ameribites has a concise article to explain everything.

DoorDash

As one of the largest delivery platforms out there, DoorDash has a blog focused on its delivery services and news in the food delivery space as a whole.

The blog also covers what trends come up in food delivery so drivers and restaurant owners can take advantage of those shifts.

Delivery Dudes

While the blog hasn’t seen much activity lately, the Delivery Dudes have a great blog that talks about not just tips and tricks for delivery, but also gives insight into their drivers’ lives.

These articles make it easy to relate to the drivers here – something we don’t always get from the largest companies!

GrubHub

Just like DoorDash, GrubHub has a blog dedicated to covering their services and the trends they see in delivery.

Because GrubHub has a different clientele than DoorDash, the blog has some types of content you won’t see on DoorDash, such as quizzes and reviews for local eateries.

Bringg

While Bringg works with more than just food, their blog is great for those looking to understand more about logistics and delivery as a whole.

This type of technical info might not appeal to the average person, but blogs made for professionals like this can be great assets for a company in the same field.

Food Blogs for Baking

For those that want inspiration from blogs about sweet treats, check out some of these popular food blogs.

The Vanilla Bean Blog

The Vanilla Bean Blog started as a family recipe project that grew into something much bigger.

Minimalist photos and simple, easy recipes helped this blog grow in popularity over time, allowing the author to continue her passion for cooking.

Top With Cinnamon

Top With Cinnamon, foundered by the young baker Izy, started as a passion project with unique recipes that eventually grew into a cookbook enterprise, starting with a cookbook of the same name.

The author uses her college degree to create exciting and fun recipes enjoyed all over the world.

Like A Strawberry Milk

The talent behind Like A Strawberry Milk shares both tips and recipes for those that want to bake like a classically-trained pastry chef.

The personal stories, fantastical illustrations, and hybrid of French and English terms endear this blog to many readers out there.

The Pink Whisk

For something a little more like what you’d see at home, The Pink Whisk has recipes and guides to help folks make desserts without any extra pomp and circumstance.

The how-to guides in particular are this blog’s most popular content thanks to the detail and photos that describe every step in clear detail.

She Who Eats

For an international take on food, the Japanese-run She Who Eats covers a combo of food and travel topics mostly centered on local dishes and ingredients.

While she mostly focuses on Instagram now, the author still wants to blog and share recipes with her readers.

Food Blogs for Cooking

Finally, for those that want to cook food and share it with the world, you can check out these killer blogs for some ideas:

Closet Cooking

For those that think a tiny kitchen is an end to making anything nice, Closet Cooking proves that wrong.

This blog features recipes made from inside a closet-sized kitchen, proving that you don’t need a lot of space or gadgets to make good food!

The blog covers both techniques and recipes.

BudgetBytes

For eaters and home cooks on a tight budget, BudgetBytes offers recipes and tips to prevent wasting money on food.

The blog goes by six principles to help readers cut back on food waste, each of which relates to all of the content on the blog.

Serious Eats

For those that want to make traditional or authentic dishes, Serious Eats is the place to go.

This blog focused on the artful side of food, seeking to elevate dishes to their highest form.

Its mission is to bring iconic meals to everyone across the world to make and enjoy for themselves.

Love and Lemons

Coming from the author’s favorite way to finish off a dish, Love and Lemons covers vegetarian recipes with plenty of flair and flavor.

In addition to having a huge number of recipes, you can filter through these recipes by season, holiday, diet, and several other factors.

Smitten Kitchen

Finally, comfort foods are part of the culture as something to enjoy with loved ones.

This is the core of Smitten Kitchen, a blog dedicated to stepped-up comfort foods meant for you to enjoy as a dish to make and eat.

The tutorial from this blog is valuable to anyone looking to up their culinary technique.

How to Become a Food Blogger

The first step to becoming a food blogger is learning how to start a blog.

Thankfully, food blogs aren’t too different from other blogs in how they are steps, meaning these steps will help you on your journey:

1. Determine the Direction of the Blog

Before you know what food blogging niche you want to tackle, you’ll need to decide the blog’s direction or focus.

How will your blog deliver its content?

What sort of topics do you want to cover?

What tone will you take when you do your writing?

You can do keyword research to uncover opportunities.

Low competition and high-traffic keywords make great for great breakout points for new blogs.

2. Select a Niche

Once you have your direction, you want to choose your niche.

The blog’s niche will be the small section on the overall topic of food.

While the types of food blogs we covered earlier are a good start, you can refine those even further.

Learning how to choose the right niche will help you pick something that isn’t too broad or specific, meaning you can find the right number of readers for your blog.

3. Select a Name

Coming up with a name for your blog is important.

The name should be something that makes sense for the world of food blogging and is not hard to pronounce or search for.

Complicated names create a barrier between your readers and content, so it is best to keep things simple for the blog’s name.

4. Select a Blogging Platform

There are different blogging platforms available, each with its own pros and cons.

Choosing one that makes sense for your blog’s traffic, your wallet, and your sanity will affect your desire to work on the blog.

Choose a platform that makes it easy to get your content out to your readers.

5. Register a Domain Name

To set up your blog, you’ll need a domain name.

This name is the foundation for the blog’s web hosting—you cannot share it between websites.

The best domain registrar works reliably and quickly to ensure you snag the web domain you want before someone else does.

6. Get Web Hosting

With your domain name locked in, you’ll want to set up web hosting for your blog.

Web hosting is a service that helps operate the servers and backend of the website.  

We suggest managed WordPress hosting because of the amount of support, features, and plugins WordPress offers.

7. Build the Blog

You will need to start building up the blog’s layout and appearance once you’re all set with the technical stuff.

Here are some of the things you will need to tackle.

Themes

Themes are website templates that help organize your website without having to code the HTML and CSS yourself.

We recommend that you install a WordPress theme that you like and adjust the layout or colors as needed to create the look you like for the blog.

Plugins

WordPress plugins are applications that work together with your WordPress site to add extra functions to the blog.

Most popular plugins add SEO tools, social media buttons, website optimizations for bandwidth, and moderation tools.

While many plugins have a premium option available, most starter blogs should focus on the free tools, to begin with.

That practice will help you learn how these tools work without committing money to the process.

Essential Pages

Several essential pages for your blog that do not relate to the blog content but do make things easier for your readers.

About Us pages, FAQ pages, and similar sections will help your readers find the answers to the question they have about you and your blog.

Several plugins can help with making these pages from templates.

8. Produce Content for the Blog

Once you have all your blog built up visually, you will need to start creating content for your blog.

Your blog’s content will depend on your niche and how you present it.

One thing we can recommend is to have a small selection of content when you launch the blog.

Following this practice will show your readers you are serious about the blog and help improve retention stats after launching the website.

9. Launch the Blog Publicly

Launching a new blog takes more than just making your blog open to the public.

But, when you launch the blog, keep an eye on your retention stats and bounce rates.

You want your readers to stick around as long as possible, so check and see if there are issues with load times or certain pages to fix problems as they arise.

10. Promote the Blog

Finally, use as many ways to promote a blog as you wish to get the word out about your new website.

Promotion will be something you do for a long time, so learning how to promote your blog will only help in the long run.

Similar Blogging Types To Check Out

Food bloggers have the benefit of relating to several other types of blogs out there.

If you enjoy running your food blog and want to explore different types of content, you might want to check out some of these options.

1. Lifestyle Blogs

Lifestyle blogs allow writers to cover different facets of how they live, such as where in the world they are and what sort of activities they participate in.

These blogs help readers relate to the writer more since they will get to see and read what you do and enjoy.

Lifestyle blogs can also include the travel niche, where writers cover the places they go to and what readers can expect from these vistas.

Since travel and food are closely related, this blog type is a common choice for food bloggers looking to branch out.

2. Blogs for Women

Many of the successful food bloggers out there are ladies.

Since women’s topics can be complex, there are hundreds of blogs for women that cover women’s topics in food, current events, and even history.

If you have experience writing about these things, creating a blog for women could be another great source of expression and income.

3. Cooking Blogs

Independent cooking blogs for restaurant chefs or food reviewers can be a great way for those individuals to show readers how they prefer their food prepared when compared to what they see regularly.

These blogs are not as common as home chef blogs, but they offer a fascinating view into the mind of a food professional most folks usually do not get to see.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are answers to the commonly asked questions out there about food blogs.

Wrapping Up

Food blogs are websites that cover a facet of the food world, such as healthy eating, recipes, reviews, or restaurants.

They may not seem complicated at first, but a lot of work goes into building and managing these websites, especially once they get big.

Still, starting a food blog isn’t that hard.

But, it does require passion and drive to stick with it long-term.

If you want to get into the world of blogging, then check out the information and some of the guides we linked here to get started on your blogging journey!