Best Served Hot: January 4–10, 2026

Hello 2026!

I hope you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration! We rang in the year with one of our lambs roasted on a spit.

The holidays kept publishing quiet for both bloggers and news outlets, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. I’m excited to unveil new and improved charts.

The report now includes relative weekly growth for social media accounts. This provides a unique pulse on the industry, allowing you to benchmark your own momentum against the top food blogs we track.

Conference & Schedule Update: At the end of this week, I’ll be at the Tastemaker Conference. If you’re there too, please come say hi! Please note that due to travel, the next issue will be in two weeks.

Help Us Grow: If you find this market intelligence valuable, please help keep this project sustainable by sharing this Substack with other food bloggers.

Best Served Hot is your weekly, actionable look behind the scenes of the world’s top food blogs, brought to you by Rachel Cunliffe (food blog designer and data scientist at cre8d design).

How we define “Top Food Blogs”: This week, we’re tracking 984 sites running Raptive ads with 100K+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. (Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded.)