Diversifying Income Series: Cooking Classes with Jess Smith from Inquiring Chef

Making decisions about diversifying your business and launching and running a cooking camp for kids with Jess Smith from Inquiring Chef.

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Welcome to episode 514 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! For part two of our Diversifying Income Series, Bjork interviews Jess Smith from Inquiring Chef.

Diversifying Income Series: Cooking Classes

Jess Smith launched her blog, Inquiring Chefs, in 2010 and has slowly but steadily transformed it into a thriving multi-six-figure business. In recent years, she’s expanded her income streams by publishing her debut cookbook, Start with a Vegetable, and launching Inquiring Chef Academy, which offers popular in-person cooking summer camps for kids in Kansas City.

In this episode, Bjork and Jess dive into the origins of Inquiring Chef Academy, exploring why and how Jess decided to add an in-person experience to her brand. Jess’s summer camps are a massive hit (with the 2025 sessions selling out in just a few hours), and they’ve reignited her passion for food blogging. Even if in-person cooking classes aren’t your thing, this episode will provide fresh insights on diversifying your income and your creative outlets — you won’t want to miss it!

Three episode takeaways:

• How to make decisions about diversifying your business — Jess’s current income distribution looks like this: 71% from ad revenue, 13% from cooking camps, 10% from her cookbook, and 6% from brand partnerships. However, when she first considered launching her cooking camps, it wasn’t driven by money but by creativity. In this discussion, Bjork and Jess talk about the importance of finding balance in your business to prevent burnout and ensure long-term success, and how to make decisions that reflect those values.
• The logistics of running your own cooking classes — Jess dives into the tools she uses to manage her cooking camps, including the software for registration, how she developed the curriculum, how she promotes the camps, how she built a team to support the operations, and why she isn’t interested in scaling her camps (yet). This episode has all the details you need if you’re considering launching something similar!
• How to launch cooking classes — Jess announced her summer camps in January 2024 and has sold out two consecutive summers of camps. She reveals how she pushed past her hesitations and shares the behind-the-scenes process of getting her cooking camps off the ground (spoiler: it was the toughest business challenge she’s faced yet)!

Resources:

• Inquiring Chef
• Cook Smarts
• Snackdive
• Pembee
• Stripe
• The Faux Martha
• Canva
• Start with a Vegetable
• Inquiring Chef Academy
• Follow Jess on Instagram and Facebook
• Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group

Thank you to our sponsor!

This episode is sponsored by Clariti.

Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to