Measured August 29, 2026 — every follower count, engagement rate and last-posted date below was read from the accounts themselves on that day, not estimated.
Food is a wide tag covering work that has little in common day to day. The 15 creators shown here were drawn from 75 accounts carrying this vertical in an index of 150,807 Instagram profiles, and the spread inside that group is the first thing to plan around: median follower count across the indexed set is 16k, while the accounts at the top of this page run into the millions. A brief written for the top of the list will not fit the middle of it, and the reverse is also true.
Candidates were filtered automatically for business, agency and repost patterns, for Instagram category and for bio language, then classified and re-checked by a second pass whose job was to argue for exclusion. Everything that survived was measured live from its own profile and its own recent posts. A person reviews and merges the page before it publishes, but does not choose who appears on it. Across the indexed set, 31% carry a verification badge; among the listed creators whose like counts are visible, median engagement rate is 0.55%.
Measured across the 75 food influencers above 10,000 followers in our creator index of 150,807 profiles, on August 29, 2026.
Reels-led. A rate this far above the page is reach beyond the follower count — the reels feed serves people who do not follow the account — so read it as distribution, not as a better audience.
259 median comments. The account where a question in the caption is most likely to be answered.
Absolute volume rather than rate — the number to plan a reach target against.
Ordered by audience size. Follower counts as recorded on August 29, 2026.
How to brief them
Wordless ASMR cooking reels, 100% of the grid, posted daily. No spoken language means no localisation cost and a product has to read visually — packaging and texture carry the spot, a claim on the label will not. Brief for in-frame use during prep, not for a spoken endorsement. At 5.9M followers 0.7% is normal; the ~38,800 median likes is the number to plan against.
I share Greek Recipes+ More ✨ NYT Best Selling Author 💙 Partnerships💌 Full Recipes + Cookbook ↙️
How to brief them
Greek home cooking from an NYT-bestselling cookbook author — the audience arrives to cook the recipe, so a product needs to be a genuine ingredient rather than a prop. Note the shape of the engagement: 5,711 median likes against 723 comments is an unusually talkative ratio at this size, so a question in the caption does more work here than anywhere else on this page.
🍉 #FullyRaw #Vegan for 21+ Years 🌱 Living on a Fruit Orchard in Hawaii 🫐 Download My Recipe App! 👇🏽 🌸 @fullyrawretreats 🇪🇨🇱🇧 Ecuadorian Lebanese
How to brief them
Twenty-one years of #FullyRaw vegan is the whole brand and the whole constraint: anything cooked, processed or animal-derived is not a hard sell, it is a refusal. Fits fresh produce, cold-pressed and raw-format products, and retreat travel. Runs her own recipe app and retreat business, so expect an existing commercial calendar to work around.
Come over, I’m making matcha 🍵 Hormone-healthy recipes + low-tox living 🧘♀️ get more tips + recipes👇
How to brief them
Hormone-healthy recipes and low-tox living — a claims-sensitive frame where ingredient lists get read in the comments. Fits matcha, supplements, cookware and personal care that survive an ingredient audit; does not fit anything carrying a low-tox liability. Daily posting at 92% reels, so turnaround is fast.
From scratch recipes for the heritage home Pantry staples • sourdough • slow homemaking Rooted in faith ✝️ ↓ Browse recipes & favorites ↓
How to brief them
From-scratch heritage homemaking — pantry staples, sourdough, slow cooking, explicitly faith-rooted. Fits flour, ferments, preservation and cookware. Look at engagement before reach: 142,000 followers against a median 78 likes is by far the lowest ratio on this page, so the follower count is the least reliable thing about this account.
Audience does not match the follower count
142,002 followers but a median of 80 likes and comments per post — roughly 1 response per 1,775 followers. The follower count is not usable as a reach estimate here.
Not a story teller for sure!🚫 Crazy content creator with love for food and travel✈️ Perks: Commercial Food Videographer📸
How to brief them
Kolkata food and travel, and he sells commercial food videography — so the deliverable here can be production rather than reach. 5.4% is the second-highest rate on this page and roughly ten times the page median; re-measured independently on 2026-08-31 it held at 4.7%, so it is real rather than a one-post artifact. India-based audience: check your market before briefing.
Nostalgic treats made high protein Biology backed recipes that actually taste good Join Kook Klub for weekly recipes ↓ LA |
How to brief them
Nostalgic desserts rebuilt as high-protein, with a stated biology-backed framing — a natural fit for protein powder, sweeteners and functional ingredients, and a poor one for anything indulgent with no macro story. 434 median likes against 259 comments is close to 2:1, which is a recipe-request audience. Last posted 12 days ago; confirm availability before building a timeline.
Johar Dulariya Sab 💗 Food | Lifestyle | Reels Fun- @tudu__ji 📩 For Brand Collaboration
How to brief them
The outlier on this page, and the one to read carefully. A median 18,897 likes against 42,517 followers is 44.7%, which is not a normal engagement figure — it means reach is arriving from the reels feed rather than from followers. Re-measured independently on 2026-08-31 it still read 37%, so the number is real, but follower count is a poor proxy for this account in either direction. Regional Jharkhand audience, collaboration address in the bio, only 88 posts in total.
🧔 Coffee Content Creator 👉 Follow to level up your coffee game ✉️ For Collaborations — contact below ☕ Check out my special deals! ⤵️
How to brief them
Single-subject: coffee and nothing else — grinders, brewers, beans, technique. The narrowness is the value and also the limit; a non-coffee product has no route in. Already running affiliate deals per the bio, so check for existing exclusivities. Posts daily.
🏆 Best Food Culture Book in the World · Gourmand 2025 Executive Head Chef · Author · International Speaker Guild of Food Writers
How to brief them
A working executive head chef with a Gourmand award and a Guild of Food Writers listing — credential-led rather than volume-led, which suits equipment, provenance and trade work more than consumer packaged goods. Like counts are hidden on this profile so engagement cannot be read from outside; the 10 median comments are the only visible signal. Last posted 27 days ago.
🥗Wellness & food lover sharing recipes to feed the body and soul. 🥑Clean Ingredients|Good Food| Optimal Wellness Click 👇🏽
How to brief them
Anti-inflammatory and gut-health recipes under a clean-ingredient constraint — fits supplements, ferments and whole-food products that can stand behind a health claim, and is the wrong room for anything ultra-processed. The only account on this page under half reels (25%), so static and carousel formats are genuinely on the table here.
𝕄𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕞𝕦𝕞𝕞𝕪 ᴄʜᴇꜰ ᴛᴜʀɴᴇᴅ ꜱᴛᴀʏ ᴀᴛ ʜᴏᴍᴇ ᴍᴜᴍ Food reviews📍 Hampshire Collab 👉🏻
How to brief them
A trained chef turned stay-at-home parent reviewing food around Hampshire — a place-tagged reviewer, not a recipe developer, so the deliverable is a visit or a tasting rather than a build. Reach is local to the UK south. Also posts openly about mental health, worth knowing before placing an adjacent product.
✨ Lost 3½+ stone with @slimmingworld 🍽️ Easy family meals & realistic weight loss 🌶️ @jdseasonings MARISSA20 ❤️ @slimmingworld kitchen SAVE-MH9P-NM88
How to brief them
A Slimming World consultant posting easy family meals and realistic weight-loss content, with affiliate codes for two brands already in the bio — check exclusivity first. 0% reels across the sampled posts: this is a static-feed account and briefing a reel would be briefing against the grain of everything it publishes.
How to brief them
Edinburgh food and drink, place-tagged, run by Erin with friends — hospitality and venue work rather than product placement. Two cautions before it goes in a plan: 0% reels in the sample, and 30 days since the last post, the longest gap on this page.
Audience does not match the follower count
A median of 20 likes and comments per post is too small to measure a campaign against at any follower count.
Food 🍔 fitness 💪🏻 health & lifestyle blogger. Addiction & liver disease survivor #Brighton #vegan
How to brief them
Vegan food and fitness in Brighton, posting daily across 4,560 lifetime posts — the highest post count here. Writes openly as an addiction and liver-disease survivor, so alcohol and anything adjacent is off the table and health claims will be read closely. 100 median likes against 64 comments is a high conversation ratio for the size.
Engagement is (median likes + median comments) ÷ followers, taken over each creator's 12 most recent posts and their follower count on the same day. Instagram lets accounts hide their like counts; 1 of these 15 do, and those show a dash rather than a rate we cannot compute.
One limit worth knowing, because it decides how to read the highest numbers here. Dividing by followers assumes a post is seen by followers. On a reels-led account that is not true — the reels feed serves people who do not follow the account, so engagement can run to a large fraction of the follower count, or past it. A rate far above the others on this page is evidence of reach beyond the audience, not of a better audience, and it makes follower count a poor proxy for that account in either direction. We publish the measured figure and say so rather than capping it to something that looks tidier.
The bios in this vertical declare a position before they declare an audience: fully raw and vegan, from-scratch pantry staples and sourdough, hormone-healthy cooking, nostalgic treats rebuilt as high protein, clean ingredients. A product that sits outside the frame an account has spent years stating is not a hard sell, it is a refusal. Read the bio for the constraint first, then decide whether your product can appear in that kitchen at all.
Part of this list develops and films recipes, including cookbook authors and a working executive head chef. Another part reviews food where it is served, tagged to a place such as Hampshire, Edinburgh or Brighton. Single-subject specialists sit alongside both, including an account built entirely on coffee. The asset you get back, and the audience that sees it, follows from which of these jobs the creator actually does.
Median reels share across the listed creators is 75%, but the range runs from grids that are nothing but reels to accounts whose recent posts contain none at all. Posting recency is just as uneven: 11 of the 15 posted within the last week, while others last published closer to a month ago. Where like counts are hidden on a profile, engagement cannot be read from outside, so the median above covers only the accounts where they are visible.
The median across the 14 creators on this page with public like counts is 0.55%, measured on August 29, 2026 over each account's 12 most recent posts and their follower count that same day. The range runs from 0.1% to 44.7%, so 0.55% is the middle of a wide spread rather than a benchmark to clear.
Our index carries 75 food influencers above 10,000 followers, out of 150,807 public Instagram profiles. Of those, 61 sit between 10K and 100K followers, 4 between 100K and 1M, and 10 above 1M. The median is 15,863 followers, which is the number to plan against — the vertical is mostly mid-sized accounts, not the megas that lead every list.
11 of the 15 posted within seven days of August 29, 2026; each row carries its own last-posted date, and 2 carry a flag saying the follower count overstates what the account now delivers. A dormant account still displays its followers, which is why the date is published beside them.
1 of the 15 hide their Instagram like counts. The API reports a placeholder for those accounts — a few likes against thousands of comments — and dividing that by followers produces a rate near zero that is an artifact, not a measurement. Those rows publish "hidden" instead. No figure on this page is estimated or borrowed from another creator.
This page is 15 accounts and the index behind it is far larger. Cheerful's creator search runs the whole index with filters on follower band, engagement, posting recency and format mix, then drafts the outreach — which is the part this list cannot do for you, since a name is only useful once someone replies. The smallest account here has 15,702 followers, so the long tail below that is where most unclaimed partnerships sit.
Candidates came from Cheerful's creator index — 150,807 public Instagram profiles, categorised automatically. Selection was automated and is disclosed as such: pattern filters removed business, agency and repost accounts, a classifier judged each remaining profile against the vertical, and a second pass whose only instruction was to argue for exclusion re-examined every survivor. Nothing reaches this page that all three agreed to keep. A person reads the result and decides whether to publish it, but does not choose who appears — that is the honest description, and the automatic categorisation it corrects for is why the filters exist at all: left alone it puts brands, clinics, restaurants and aggregator accounts alongside individual creators.
The distribution figures come from that index. Every per-creator number — followers, engagement, median likes and comments, reels share, last posted — was measured directly on August 29, 2026 by reading each account and its 12 most recent posts. Nothing is estimated, and no figure is borrowed from a creator other than the one it sits beside.
Where a number cannot be measured we leave it out rather than fill it in. 1 of these 15 accounts hide their Instagram like counts, so their engagement rate shows a dash — the API reports a near-zero figure for them and publishing that would be wrong.
2 of these 15 accounts carry a flag on the follower count. The rule is stated rather than judged: fewer than one like-or-comment per 1,000 followers on the median post, fewer than 50 responses per post outright, or nothing published in the 30 days before the measurement. A list that prints a follower count and stays quiet about that is the reason briefing from these pages goes wrong.
These are public profiles and we have no commercial relationship with the creators listed. If you are on this page and would rather not be, contact us and we will remove you — no reason required.
This page is 15 accounts. Cheerful's search runs the whole index of 150,807 profiles, filters on the things that actually decide a partnership — engagement, recency, format mix, follower band — and writes the outreach.
