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Todd Anderson, known as @turnipvegan to his 3M+ followers, has built a thriving food creator business over the last half-decade. Boil it down, and his success is about video production skills, an earnest strength of character, and a willingness to adapt to the platforms.
In this episode:
💰 The eight revenue streams composing Todd’s business
👥 Building a subscription business outside of the main platforms
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
From feed to table
One night in 2020, standing in his San Diego apartment, Todd Anderson plated a tray of croissant breakfast sandwiches. He filmed a quick video, posted it to Instagram, went to sleep — and woke up to a line stretched outside Spoiled Vegans, the cafe he co-owned.
"I walked downstairs and there's all these youths on skateboards just lined up to try the food. And I'm just like, wow, that's incredible — the power of a short video and what it could do to change your business.
That is when I started to take content creation seriously."
By then, Todd already knew his way around a camera. He’d spent nearly fifteen years making videos, dating back to the mid-2000s, when he was filming music content for his hip-hop group and posting on MySpace. As a career path, however, what we now call content creation still felt distant.
In 2016, after what he describes as a wild weekend in Las Vegas, he decided to go vegan — a personal shift that redirected the trajectory of his work. For the next four years, he documented San Diego’s vegan scene almost obsessively, building relationships and sharpening his instincts without any real plan to monetize the audience forming around him.
Instagram had been Todd’s home platform since the beginning, but the early years were quiet. He'd reach out to vegan restaurateurs and athletes, film them for free, and post the results to his page.
By 2019, he’d reached 20k followers, but still lacked momentum.
Once 2020 came along, his fiancée told him she'd support them financially if he wanted to go all-in on content, so he quit his day job in admissions at Grand Canyon University and joined one of the first TikTok-run creator coaching cohorts, where he learned to tell a complete story in 15 seconds. Mastering brevity would change the trajectory of his work.
That same year, the pre-prepared foods company Amy's Kitchen offered him $300 for a video — his first brand deal. Within six months, he had an agent and was landing five or six partnerships a month.
He brought this 15-second storytelling discipline back to Instagram, and his audience on both Instagram and TikTok bloomed. His YouTube and Snapchat audiences followed suit. Then, in 2024, after his Instagram and TikTok audiences plateaued, he started cross-posting his Reels on Facebook.
@turnipvegan The Ice Cream Bean test 📝 with you friend Turnip Vegan 😀🥹 When my mom use to tell me “Boy you better eat your beans” I wish she was talki... See more
Initially skeptical of Facebook’s relevance in the contemporary platform ecosystem, Todd saw his following spike by 1 million in 9 months.
At the time of writing, his social media following stands just over 3 million total:
Brand deals now account for roughly half his revenue, and the other half comes from:
A paid recipe club ($9.99/month, 200+ recipes hosted on his own site rather than locked behind an Instagram or YouTube subscription)
Two self-published cookbooks
A partnership selling Turnip Vegan–branded lion's mane mushroom growing kits with North Spore, a mushroom growing company
Native platform monetization across his accounts
A fast-growing retreat business
These retreats have become a central part of the business — each a week-long immersion in the Belizean jungle, with no cell reception, and with Todd cooking every meal himself. He ran two in 2025; this year, he’ll run four or five, with plans to expand from Belize to Joshua Tree, Florida, and Rwanda.
His long-term vision is to build an off-grid compound in California’s high desert, where he settled after leaving San Diego, with greenhouses powered by solar energy and well water.
For six years, Todd treated platforms as the center of the business, constantly feeding the algorithm, learning the mechanics of attention in real time. Now, he’s using the audience and capital that those platforms generated to build something that can exist beyond them, rooted and sustainable.
Connect with Todd on Instagram.
Learn more about Turnip Vegan.
Two platform habits behind 1M Facebook followers
From your Assistant Editor, Natalia Pérez-González — a couple of ideas that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation ✍️.
Take a platform’s nudges seriously.
When Meta, TikTok, or YouTube starts surfacing a new prompt, format, or share option, that's a signal about where the platform is investing engineering, ad inventory, and algorithmic boost. Todd always leans into those nudges.
(When she joined us in the Spotlight, industry expert Lia Haberman shared a 7-step guide for how to read these nudges).
For months, he'd been getting Meta's one-tap prompt to cross-post his Reels to Facebook. His peers were waving it off, but he started doing it anyway, and in nine months, he added 1 million followers. One month, his content reached 67 million people. Direct traffic from Facebook funneled into every other channel he was running.
Study your own data closely.
Todd treats every batch of 10 videos as a dataset: post 10, study them, identify what worked, repeat. He credits Gary Vaynerchuk for this system.
Earlier this year, the habit paid off. While traveling in Africa, his Reels weren't landing — so he tried eighteen- to twenty-slide Instagram carousels telling the same kinds of stories instead. Three months in, his carousels are consistently outperforming his Reels.
His read: Meta seems to have shifted from scoring each format separately to scoring his whole account as one number — meaning a strong carousel lifts the reach of his Reels and everything else.
