The Spill: Lessons From A Mother-Daughter Duo With Millions of Followers
Crowded Kitchen is a mother-daughter duo with a massive following. But up until last year, they were feeling stuck.
Then, in just 9 months, they were able to grow their audience across all their platforms by 2 million.
So they know a thing or two about what it takes to make it in the recipe creation space.
Luckily, Lexi Harrison, was game to share some of their secrets.
She’s spilling:
Her biggest tips for audience growth
How their partnership was with Bob’s Red Mill came to be
What they’re trying to achieve this year
And wayyy more.
A little background on Crowded Kitchen and how you got started.
I ran track & field and cross country in college at a very small school with 1 dining hall and no off campus living. My junior year, I decided to start an Instagram account to document how I was eating as a college athlete with limited options, and pretty soon after, my mom (Beth) decided to join in to help me out with content. We’ve always been very close and share an interest in cooking, baking, etc.
Once I graduated, I worked for a food media company in NYC for one year, and then decided to move back home in 2017 so my mom and I could pursue our business full time. At that point, we rebranded to Crowded Kitchen and we’ve been working together ever since!
As a family with multiple food intolerances, allergies and preferences, our goal is to share recipes that can be easily adapted and bring everyone together around the dinner table. We specialize in recipes utilizing seasonal produce and love to experiment in the kitchen.
Today, we are a 3+ person business (my husband, Brent, joined in 2020) and have continued growing and changing every year. My mom heads up our recipe development and my husband and I manage the content creation and business development side of things.
What’s your biggest advice for other recipe creators trying to crack the 1 million follower milestone?
To provide a little background on our social media journey, we grew to 100k pretty quickly back in the day (2016-17), and then worked our way up to ~215k by 2021. From 2021 to May of 2023, we were pretty much stuck at the same number with no growth and very low reach.
Last Spring, we decided to really buckle down on a new strategy for social media and have grown our audience by 2 million across all of our social media platforms in the last 9 months.
There are SO many different aspects of our strategy that we’ve changed in the last year, but here are my top few words of advice:
Differentiate your content from everyone else. It’s SO hard to stand out on social media, especially in the food space. Instead of posting “viral” recipes that everyone else is also posting, come up with a unique angle or a series to stand apart from the crowd. For example: we are currently doing a series called “Better Than Store-Bought” where we’re recreating popular store-bought snacks at home. By organizing it as a series, we’re drawing people in and they are much more likely to follow if they resonate with the content and want to see what’s next.
Quick clips, iPhone only, voiceovers and long captions! As a general rule of thumb, videos with quick cuts tend to perform better on social media (IG specifically). The cuts should be shorter than you think. For example, if it takes 2 seconds to pour milk into a bowl, only use .8 seconds of that footage. We film everything on our iPhone (there’s no need to waste time with professional footage since it generally doesn’t perform as well anyways). Voiceovers perform (on average) better than music, and a long caption with keywords and helpful tips is not only user friendly, but also may help boost your post in the algorithm.
Are there other creators in the space you’re inspired by?
So many! We don’t like to look to other creators when it comes to coming up with our content strategy, BUT we are constantly inspired by building relationships with other creators, sharing tips and tricks with each other and having a sense of community. It can be a bit lonely working by yourself in this industry and I’m very grateful for some of the friendships I’ve formed with other creators.
LOVE your Better Than Store-Bought series. How’d you come up with that?
Thanks so much! We shared a few recipes this fall that were homemade versions of store-bought snacks and they performed really well. There was a ton of interest so we thought it would make sense to organize the content around a series. We also LOVE experimenting with different recipes and these have been a lot of fun to develop!
What was your first big partnership and how did it happen?
I think our first big, long term partnership was with Bob’s Red Mill. It was a one-year contract with bi-monthly posts and it was so exciting! We had been building a relationship with them for a while by mentioning their products on social media and in our blog posts. We were already huge fans of their products, so it was a natural fit. I’m pretty sure we reached out via DM and after following up several times (don’t give up!), we were able to secure a spot in their yearly blogger program.
Do you have a sense of which recipes will take off before you share them?
In general, yes. But sometimes posts don’t do nearly as well as we predict or vice versa and something very surprising will majorly outperform our expectations. You never know what’s going to do well, so be bold and try several different strategies! Once a few posts start to do well, it’s easier to identify any patterns and figure out the best strategy going forward.
What’s 1 recipe you absolutely couldn’t live without?
Our Greek chickpea salad. We seriously make it at least once a week, if not multiple times per week. I just love it! I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of it.
What are you hoping to accomplish this year?
After a solid year of building up our social media presence, we want to continue to post consistently and build more of a community within our audience. We also want to shift our focus a bit back to our website. We are investing in a brand refresh later this summer and we’re also starting to work on a very exciting, very big project that we can hopefully share more about soon!
Biggest takeaways from Crowded Kitchen’s success
The fact that up until 2023, Lexi and Beth felt like they couldn’t crack the ~215k follower milestone on Instagram (when they currently have 1.2M followers) should be MASSIVE inspiration for any creator trying to break out.
Their Better Than Store-Bought series is the perfect example of finding repeatable content that really resonates with their audience (and attracts others!).
The biggest takeaway? You have control over your own destiny. Don’t be afraid to switch up your strategy and try something new!
Go follow @crowded_kitchen to see what else Lexi and Beth are up to!
