Top Food Content Creators in Australia (2026)

Australia’s food creator scene keeps returning the same names: on TikTok Awards shortlists, on cookbook covers, and now on MasterChef. The top food content creators in Australia run from a Melbourne mother with 49 YouTube subscribers to a chef with 6.29 million. Both were nominated for the same award, one year apart. That gap is the most useful thing on this page.

The short answer: two lists define the category. TikTok Australia’s Food Creator of the Year shortlists (2024 and 2025) name ten creators picked by an editorial process, and the recipe creators who have converted an audience into a published cookbook name most of the rest. Follower count sorts these people badly, and the numbers below show why.

Key Takeaways

Ten Australian food creators have been shortlisted for TikTok Australia’s Food Creator of the Year since the category began in 2024. Michael Finch won in 2024; Andy Hearnden won in 2025.
YouTube subscriber counts across this roster span 49 to 6.29 million, read from each creator’s public channel page on 1 September 2026.
Six of the 13 creators listed here have a published cookbook, including Nagi Maehashi, whose first book Pan Macmillan Australia calls the fastest-selling cookbook in Australian publishing history.
Instagram’s Australian advertising reach was 15.2 million and TikTok’s 10.9 million in late 2025, according to DataReportal. Australian food discovery sits on those two platforms.
Mumbrella put Australian influencer marketing spend at A$830 million over the preceding twelve months, growing 13.5 percent year on year and projected to pass A$1 billion during 2026.

Who Are the Top Food Content Creators in Australia?

Thirteen creators, listed alphabetically rather than ranked. Ten of them come from the two TikTok Awards Food Creator of the Year shortlists. The other three are recipe creators with audiences large enough, or distinctive enough, that a brief on Australian food content would be incomplete without them. Every name here works primarily in food and posts for an Australian audience.

Creator	Handle	Based	Known for
Andy Hearnden	@andy_cooks	Australia	Chef-led recipe videos, technique
Catherine Zhang	@catherine.desserts	Sydney	Pastry, desserts, Chinese-Australian baking
Fatimah Omran	@fatimahomran	Sydney	Middle Eastern home cooking, whole foods
Iain “Huey” Hewitson	@huey_on_tiktok	Melbourne	Classic cooking from a former TV chef
Laleh Mohmedi	@jacobs_food_diaries	Melbourne	Meals shaped into characters and faces
Lily Huynh	@biteswithlily	Sydney	Street food, restaurant reviews, Asian snacks
Michael Finch	@michaelfinch	Gold Coast	Accessible home cooking, ramen reviews
Morgan Hipworth	@morganhipworth	Melbourne	Doughnuts, baking, restaurant operator
Nagi Maehashi	@recipe_tin_eats	Sydney	Tested everyday recipes at scale
Nat’s What I Reckon	@natswhatireckon	Sydney	Comedy cooking, anti-jar-sauce
Tom Smallwood	@tom.smallwood	Australia	Simple cooking for couples and solo cooks
Victoria Minell	@recipesbyvictoria	Australia	Recipe development
Vincent Yeow Lim	@dimsimlim	Australia	Wok cooking, Chinese family recipes

The list was built from two inputs: the TikTok Awards Australia Food Creator of the Year shortlists, and the largest Australian recipe channels on YouTube. Award shortlists are the only place in this category where somebody outside the creator’s own analytics has made a judgement about who matters. Channel size fills the gaps that an annual award of five nominees inevitably leaves.

The only audience numbers published here are YouTube subscriber counts, read directly from each creator’s channel page on 1 September 2026. There are no Instagram or TikTok counts, because those cannot be read reliably without logging in, and any number in a listicle is stale within a week. Where a publisher has reported a figure, it is attributed to that publisher and dated. Treat all of it as a snapshot and re-check before you use it in a brief.

Read live on 1 September 2026: Andy Cooks 6.29 million, Bites With Lily 2.78 million, dimsimlim 1.99 million, Michael Finch 888,000, RecipeTin Eats 829,000, Nat’s What I Reckon 144,000, Recipes by Victoria 28,900, Fatimah Omran 25,700, Morgan Hipworth 7,210, and Jacob’s Food Diaries 49. Catherine Zhang and Tom Smallwood do not publish a readable YouTube subscriber count, so none is given for them.

The TikTok Awards Shortlists Are Australia’s Only Independent Food Creator Ranking

TikTok Australia introduced a Food Creator of the Year category at its 2024 awards, held on 27 November 2024. It is the closest thing Australia has to an editorially chosen ranking of food creators. Ten creators have been shortlisted across two years, five each. The Stable described the 2025 category as celebrating “the creator who inspired us to cook delicious meals in 2025”.

Year	Nominees	Winner
2024	Fatimah Omran, Iain “Huey” Hewitson, Lily Huynh, Michael Finch, Victoria Minell	Michael Finch
2025	Vincent Lim, Andy Hearnden, Catherine Zhang, Laleh Mohmedi, Tom Smallwood	Andy Hearnden

The 2024 nominee list was reported by Mediaweek on 23 October 2024, and TikTok Australia announced Michael Finch as the winner on its own account. The Stable published the 2025 shortlist on 22 October 2025, and TikTok’s newsroom confirmed Andy Hearnden as the 2025 winner at the event held in Sydney on 26 November 2025, where 6.4 million votes were cast across all categories.

Read these as a signal of standing, not a performance measure. They are platform awards, decided partly by public vote, and a creator with a mobilised audience can out-vote a creator with a better one. What a shortlist does tell you is that a platform’s own team looked at the Australian food category and put five names forward. That is a shorter list than any brand will assemble on its own in an afternoon.

The Recipe Creators: Audiences That Became Cookbooks

Six creators on this list have published a cookbook, which is the single most informative credential in the group. Nagi Maehashi started RecipeTin Eats in Sydney in 2014. Pan Macmillan Australia states the site receives half a billion hits a year, that her social following is over 5 million, that her first book Dinner is the fastest-selling cookbook in Australian publishing history, and that in 2023 it became the first cookbook to win the Australian Book Industry Award’s Book of the Year. Her second book, Tonight, won the ABIA Illustrated Book of the Year in 2025. She founded the food bank RecipeTin Meals in 2021, which Pan Macmillan says cooks and donates 130,000 meals a year.

Andy Hearnden is a New Zealand chef based in Australia who trained in Auckland, worked in London including for Tom Aikens, became a head chef at 24, then was head chef at Gills Diner and Entrecote in Melbourne and executive chef at the St Ali coffee chain. He started posting as Andy Cooks on TikTok in November 2021 and published Andy Cooks: The Cookbook in 2023. Wikipedia records his YouTube channel at 6.18 million subscribers on 30 April 2026, against 6.29 million read on 1 September 2026, which is roughly 110,000 in four months.

Fatimah Omran, born in Sydney to Lebanese migrant parents, began posting cooking videos with her mother on TikTok during the pandemic to record family recipes. Penguin Books Australia states her cookbook Middle Eastern Simple carries more than 90 recipes and that her focus on whole foods followed a 2006 cancer diagnosis. Tom Smallwood started in a kitchen at 16 as a dishwasher before moving to a patisserie, according to Penguin Books Australia, and published Tom’s Diner: Cook. Share. Eat. Repeat on 11 November 2025 with more than 90 recipes aimed at couples, housemates and solo cooks. Catherine Zhang won the second season of Netflix’s Zumbo’s Just Desserts and is a pastry chef and recipe developer with a food nutrition science background, drawing on her Chinese and Australian heritage; her book is Mochi, Cakes and Bakes. Nat’s What I Reckon, a Sydney stand-up comedian, musician and mental health advocate, turned lockdown “Death to Jar Sauce” videos into a run of Penguin Australia titles including Un-cook Yourself, Death to Jar Sauce and Smash Hits Recipes, a hardback collection of 45 recipes. Morgan Hipworth founded the Bistro Morgan bakehouse in Melbourne in 2016 at 15, is a trained pastry chef, now runs the By Morgan Group including the Fitzroy restaurant Maven by Morgan, and appeared on Network Ten’s Dessert Masters.

A cookbook deal tells a brand three separate things. The audience trusts the creator enough to buy something from them, which is a harder ask than a click. A publisher has done its own commercial due diligence and concluded the audience is real. And the creator now has a negotiating position, a book to sell and a schedule that a campaign has to fit around.

The Reviewers and the Wok: Where Australian Food Discovery Actually Happens

Recipe channels teach people to cook. Reviewers and short-form cooks send people to venues and put products in baskets. Lily Huynh covers street food, restaurant reviews and Asian snacks in Sydney and runs the second-largest channel on this list at 2.78 million subscribers. Michael Finch, on the Gold Coast, posts accessible home cooking and ramen reviews. Style Magazines reported in July 2025 that he moved across from beauty content after losing his passion for makeup, that he has four million followers, and that he won Food Creator of the Year.

Vincent Yeow Lim was born in Malaysia and moved to Australia. SBS reports that his father Danny Lim owned restaurants including the Wokinabox franchise, that Vincent opened Lawson Chinese Restaurant in the Blue Mountains and sold it in 2022 to focus on content, and that he posts up to five recipe videos a week across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. That is a publishing cadence most brands cannot match with an agency retainer.

Laleh Mohmedi turns meals into cartoon characters and famous faces, which started when she shaped her son Jacob’s pancakes into a lion. ABC News covered the account in 2017 and SBS Food reported that she turned it into a full-time business within 18 months, working on food and wellness campaigns and running workshops. Iain “Huey” Hewitson, born 4 October 1948, opened the Collingwood restaurant Clichy in 1977 and later hosted Huey’s Kitchen on television. New Idea reported in November 2024 that he launched his TikTok in April 2024 at the age of 75, at his daughter Charlotte’s urging, that she films on her phone using a roughly three-dollar bedroom lamp, and that he was close to 100,000 followers and over 375,000 likes within seven months. On the nomination he said: “very humbling, just amazing. It’s boggling.” Victoria Minell, a recipe developer and content creator, completes the 2024 shortlist.

Which Platform Do Australian Food Creators Live On?

TikTok and Instagram, with YouTube as the long-form and archive layer. DataReportal’s Digital 2026: Australia report counts 21.0 million active social media user identities in October 2025, with Instagram advertising reach of 15.2 million Australian adults and TikTok advertising reach of 10.9 million in late 2025. Instagram is the larger surface; TikTok is where this particular category was built.

The roster is the evidence. Every creator here is identified by a TikTok handle, and the one award that ranks them is a TikTok award. Andy Hearnden started on TikTok in November 2021 and now has 6.29 million YouTube subscribers, in that order. Iain Hewitson reached close to 100,000 followers in seven months on TikTok in his mid-seventies, without a YouTube presence to speak of. Laleh Mohmedi has a national profile and 49 YouTube subscribers.

YouTube still matters, because it holds the long-form version and keeps earning views for years. It just is not where the audience is found. If you are working out how to split a food and beverage budget across platforms, the food and beverage influencer marketing strategy guide covers that decision properly rather than in a paragraph.

Why Follower Count Ranks Australian Food Creators Badly

Take three creators from the same award category. Laleh Mohmedi has 49 YouTube subscribers and a 2025 TikTok Food Creator of the Year nomination. Fatimah Omran has 25,700 YouTube subscribers and a Penguin cookbook. Andy Hearnden has 6.29 million subscribers and the 2025 award. Sorting those three by any single follower number produces an order that tells you almost nothing about which one will sell your product.

Four things to check instead.

Is the audience actually Australian? A food creator posting in English picks up viewers from the United States, the United Kingdom and India without trying. A 500,000-follower account with 20 percent Australian viewers is a 100,000-follower account for your purposes. Ask for a screenshot of the audience-country breakdown from the creator’s own analytics, dated, and read it before you talk about rates.

Read the last twenty posts, not the follower number. Look at how many are paid, what the comments say, and whether engagement on sponsored posts holds up against organic ones. Twenty posts takes about fifteen minutes per creator and catches almost everything a follower count hides. On what to actually measure once the campaign runs, the breakdown of measuring a food delivery creator campaign sets out the metrics that survive scrutiny.

Agree rates and usage rights before anything is produced. Usage is where food campaigns go wrong: the brand assumes it can run the video as a paid ad for six months, the creator priced an organic post. Settle the term, the platforms, whether whitelisting is included and whether the brand can cut the footage, in writing, before a shoot date is booked.

Count the coordination load honestly. One creator is an email thread. Twelve creators is a briefing document, twelve rate negotiations, twelve product deliveries, twelve draft reviews, a chase cycle for the three who go quiet, and a reporting pull at the end. That is the part most in-house teams underestimate, and it is the single biggest reason multi-creator food campaigns slip. It is also the work our managed campaign service exists to absorb.

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What Brands Can Learn From These Creators

A specific territory beats general food content. Laleh Mohmedi does meals shaped into faces. Nat’s What I Reckon does one joke about jar sauce, extremely well. Fatimah Omran does her mother’s Lebanese recipes. Not one of these people is a general food creator, and the two award winners are the specific ones too. If a creator’s positioning can be described in five words, an audience can hold it in their head.

Several of these creators are chefs or restaurateurs, which changes the negotiation. Andy Hearnden was a head chef at 24 and an executive chef at St Ali. Morgan Hipworth runs a hospitality group. Vincent Yeow Lim owned and sold a restaurant. Catherine Zhang is a trained pastry chef. They bring real credibility to a product claim, and they also have opinions about your product, other income, and less patience for a brief that tells them what to say.

The pipeline runs creator to cookbook to television, so this year’s affordable creator is next year’s expensive one. Mumbrella reported on 17 April 2026 that Dim Sim Lim, Victoria Minell and Lily Huynh would appear across the new MasterChef Australia season, which premiered on 19 April 2026 on Network 10, and Pedestrian TV reported on 21 April 2026 that Andy Hearnden also appears. Four names off these two shortlists, on free-to-air, inside eighteen months of being nominated.

The age range is wider than most briefs assume. Iain Hewitson was 75 when he started on TikTok, filmed by his daughter on a phone with a three-dollar lamp, and was shortlisted for a national food creator award the following year. Morgan Hipworth opened a bakehouse at 15. A food brief that specifies 25 to 34 year old creators is excluding both ends of a category that clearly works at both ends.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who won TikTok Australia’s Food Creator of the Year?

Michael Finch won the inaugural award in 2024, announced by TikTok Australia at the event on 27 November 2024. Andy Hearnden won in 2025 at the Sydney event on 26 November 2025, where TikTok’s newsroom reported 6.4 million votes cast across all categories.

How many YouTube subscribers does Andy Cooks have?

Andy Hearnden’s Andy Cooks channel showed 6.29 million subscribers when read on 1 September 2026. Wikipedia recorded 6.18 million on 30 April 2026, so the channel added roughly 110,000 subscribers over four months. He is the largest Australian-based food creator on YouTube by a wide margin.

Which Australian food creators have published a cookbook?

Nagi Maehashi (Dinner and Tonight, Pan Macmillan Australia), Andy Hearnden (Andy Cooks: The Cookbook, 2023), Fatimah Omran (Middle Eastern Simple, Penguin), Tom Smallwood (Tom’s Diner, Penguin, 11 November 2025), Catherine Zhang (Mochi, Cakes and Bakes) and Nat’s What I Reckon, whose Penguin Australia titles include Un-cook Yourself, Death to Jar Sauce and Smash Hits Recipes.

Are Australian food creators bigger on TikTok or Instagram?

Instagram has the larger Australian base, with advertising reach of 15.2 million Australian adults in late 2025 against TikTok’s 10.9 million, according to DataReportal. TikTok is where the food category was built: the only Australian food creator award is a TikTok award, and every creator on this list is identified by their TikTok handle.

How do I check whether a food creator’s audience is really Australian?

Ask for a dated screenshot of the audience-country breakdown from the creator’s own platform analytics, before rates are discussed. English-language food content collects large overseas audiences by default, so a 500,000-follower account at 20 percent Australian is a 100,000-follower buy. Check the last twenty posts for comment language and location cues as a second read.

Where a Shortlist Ends and Buying Begins

This list is a starting point for a shortlist, not a buying decision. The people here are the visible top of an Australian food creator category that runs several thousand deep, and for most food and beverage briefs the right answer sits well below this level of profile: a local home cook with a small, engaged suburban following will often move more product per dollar than a national name. Every number above was read on 1 September 2026 and will have moved by the time you brief anything.

Australia Experiences is a fully managed influencer and UGC marketing agency in Australia working with over 1000 vetted nano- and micro-creators, and the brand approves every creator before a campaign starts. If the shortlist you need is thirty creators rather than thirteen, that is the work.

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