Jennifer Pallian has always lived at the intersection of beakers and baking. As a food and nutrition science grad in 2010, she spent her days developing recipes and troubleshooting them for commercial bakeries, and her nights blogging those lessons for everyday cooks.
“I started my blog as a creative outlet because I just really wanted to connect with people over food,” she recalls.
So in 2009, armed with a point‑and‑shoot camera, she launched Foodess, named by mashing up the words: “food” and “goddess.”
Back in those early days, food blogs were just a tiny pond: “Joy the Baker, Smitten Kitchen, not very many others,” Jennifer says.
But it was Jennifer’s meticulous scientific pedigree that quickly set Foodess apart.
Week after week she posted recipes that would work the first time you’d try them, all thanks to the same rigor she once applied in that flour company’s product‑development test kitchen.
The payoff came in 2013 when Foodess landed on Saveur magazine’s Best Food Blog finalist list, a “pinch‑me moment” that practically doubled her readership overnight.
Blogging still felt like a hobby, though… until one day an email arrived offering $5,000 for a single sponsored post about an ice cream bar.
Convinced it wasn’t real, Jennifer tossed it into her spam box. But it was her husband who convinced her otherwise. And that surreal payday proved to Jennifer that people did, in fact, value her voice — and that blogging could be the answer to all of her fabulous cooking dreams.
