The Food Blogger Pro Podcast · Bjork Ostrom

Monique Volz On Reinventing Ambitious Kitchen Over 14 Years

·49 min·3 clips

Monique says 2020–2022 forced her into burnout, then into a major rethink of success.

1. The Food Blogger Pro Podcast episode centers on Monique Volz and Ambitious Kitchen’s 14-year evolution. 2. Emily hosts for the Food Blogger Pro team, and Bjork interviews Monique Volz because she has run Ambitious Kitchen since 2011. 3. The episode asks how a food creator changes when the business moves from blogging weekends to managing teams, platforms, and cookbooks. 4. Monique says she started Ambitious Kitchen in 2011 while still in college and working corporate social at General Mills in Minneapolis. 5. She names 2011 to 2013 her “beginner era,” when she posted on weekends, learned from a small blogging community, and experimented with Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. 6. Monique says Pinch of Yum’s monthly income reports made her realize food blogging could become a business in 2013. 7. She says her income reached about $65,000 in 2014, which matched her salary at General Mills and led her to quit and move to Chicago. 8. Monique describes 2015 to 2017 as a growth period where Instagram became a major income channel through sponsored posts. 9. She says she was doing photography, backend work, and content herself before outsourcing photography to Sarah from Broma Bakery and hiring her first employee in 2016 or early 2017. 10. Monique says around 2018 the job shifted toward oversight, with an agency, a full-time photographer, and a full-time videographer needing coordination. 11. She says 2020 brought the biggest site traffic she had ever seen because of COVID and that she was also having a baby. 12. Monique says TikTok and Reels forced her to create more content across more platforms, which increased pressure on her team. 13. She says she hit burnout in 2021 and took a step back in 2022, which she calls her “burnout era.” 14. Monique explains that a hired video creator reused old website recipes and gave them new life on social media, so the content felt fresh without requiring constant new production. 15. She says that move let her focus on her first cookbook and later her second cookbook instead of chasing viral posts. 16. Monique says the shift from “what can you create that’s going to go viral?” toward authentic recipe work changed how she evaluates success. 17. The conversation uses a reflective, interview style with Bjork pushing on eras, business decisions, and personal tradeoffs. 18. Monique speaks in a candid, practical tone and directly names burnout, outsourcing, and the limits of managing people. 19. Listeners who build content businesses or food blogs will likely get the most from this episode. 20. People wanting a tightly edited tactics-only episode may skip it.

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