About

Took on a part time job at Dumpling Shack to pleat dumplings on the weekend for their business. This was my first taste of being part of a food side hustle.

I started helping out my friend with her food blog purely just as a hobby and for fun. This meant that I was attending restaurant events and visiting restaurants to take content, and I began networking with PR agencies and restaurant owners.

Around the end of 2019, I decided to set up my own food blog page as I had accumulated too many food pics and annoyed my friends with the amount of food I’d be posting! After some debate, I settled for @vernahungrybanana as the name since my personal account was named @verna.banana, so it felt fitting.

When the pandemic arrived in March 2020, like everybody else, I began cooking and documenting everything I ate online. Sometimes I was cooking three times a day and posting everything online became my coping mechanism to distract myself.

After about a month of posting on Instagram, my account grew to 5k followers and I felt quite encouraged to keep going.

It was about 4-5 months in before I landed my first ever sponsored campaign with a brand. I spent ages working on that because I was really excited about being paid for this hobby of mine.

At the time I joked that it was the start of my side hustle, and I had no idea it would continue for years to come.

The paid campaigns kept coming and my blog started growing by the day. It was a crazy period of time juggling my full-time job as a tech consultant and also cooking in my spare time.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to have my own place to do more work as my housemates at the time were growing increasingly stressed at the amount of PR packages that I used to received.

So come Janary 2021, I moved into my own flat and the content stuff got more serious.

Around March 2021, the problem with Asian-related hate crimes was at its peak so I decided to create an e-book to help raise money for the London Chinese Community Centre. I raised an overall sum of £2800+!

After the success of my self-published e-book, my agent reached out to me for the first time asking me if I wanted to write a real cookbook with a publisher. Naturally, I began working on my book proposal after a few sessions of brainstorming and discussions.

Hit 100k followers on both Instagram and Tiktok!!! Tiktok even mentioned me in their article:

It had been about 2 years since I first started posting content online and it was finally time that I went all in with my food content creation career. Everything happens for a reason!

A month after going full-time, I secured my book deal with DK (Penguin Random House) and I've never been SO excited, while simultaneously experiencing the biggest rush of imposter syndrome.
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After working on my book manuscript for a few months, I had shot my cookbook photos with a team of photographers and food stylists. It was SO cool, especially seeing my recipes come to life with the magic touch of my photography dream team.

A year later... my debut cookbook officially released and I became a published author!!!

Nothing could have prepared me for this journey but I would not have it any other way...
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With the book now officially out, it was only right to host some live cooking demos. Here's me doing a tasting event at Toppings, Bath in conjunction to Chinese New Year.
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