Scottish TikTok food blogger Emily Franchi finds recipe for success

The National

5 days ago

Emily Franchi, 23, known on TikTok as @foodbyfranchi, started posting food content on the platform less than a year ago and has already gained a following of more than 180,000 people.
It began with Franchi just casually posting her weekly dinners and before she knew it, she had people from across the world tuning in daily to see her latest meal.
Franchi said: 'I am overwhelmed, it feels great. It is such a lovely feeling because people are so nice. It's great to know people want to follow along with what I'm making for dinner.
'I do question 'why are you all following me' but the main feeling is happiness that I am inspiring people to get into the kitchen with new ideas for their weekly dinner rotation.'
Franchi's love for cooking comes from her family as her parents were always cooking while she was growing up at home.
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Albeit she never partook in cooking herself and it was not until the start of last year when Franchi moved out her family home that she began cooking.
She said: 'I kind of fell into it, to be honest, it was a bit of a weird one. I moved out of my parents' house, and I was experimenting with cooking last year. Then I saw a trend on TikTok going round that people were posting what they had for dinner this week and I thought why not jump on the trend.'
She made two posts and one of her posts went viral months later.
'I posted a couple in September then I never really bothered again and while I was on holiday a few months later, it started going really viral, so it wasn't an immediate thing,' Franchi explained.
That TikTok featured the meals she had cooked that week including honey chilli chicken, butter chicken, chilli, and roast chicken.
Since resuming her posting, it has been a constant growth for her account in 2025, and she believes the reason for that success is the relatability of her content.
Dishes like crispy chilli chicken noodles, sweet and sour chicken, chicken tikka kebab bowls, and chicken chorizo pasta have all scored views around the one million mark.
Her most viewed TikTok – at 32.4 million views and two million likes – features some of her dinner ideas such as buffalo tenders with mac and cheese, chorizo carbonara, steak and chilli garlic noodles, and katsu curry.
'A lot of the dinners and recipes I post are catered to beginners, they are easy in that sense and quite quick,' she said.
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'I post a lot of 20-minute recipes for people which suits people who are working full time or have kids.
'All of my ingredients are accessible and quite budget-friendly which I think is what resonates with people too.'
The inspiration for her recipes comes from a mix of her mum's cooking growing up, online information, and a lot of trial and error when she combines some of her favourite dishes together to see if they work.
In May, after months of being asked to by her followers, Franchi published a digital cookbook that people can buy which features 50 of her favourite and most requested recipes.
She said: 'The idea came from my followers to have recipes all in one place that they could access on their phone because it can be hard to scroll to find things on my page.
'I kind of thought people want this now and a hard copy cookbook would take months of working with a company to get it.
'Whereas I wanted to get something to my followers quickly and it was just a couple of weeks of late nights to put it together myself.'
Her most popular TikTok post has amounted to more than 32 million views when she showed off 20 dinner ideas for people to use and Franchi said the reception she has had from people has been great.
'My favourite comments are people saying thank you and people saying this is a lifesaver which has been so strange,' Franchi added.
'That was one thing I didn't realise people were struggling with. People are like, I hate thinking of new dinner ideas, especially with kids, and they tend to get stuck in the rut of having the same thing every week on rotation.
'A lot of people say they sit down on a Sunday, come to my page and plan their weekly dinners.'
Franchi said she has many plans for the future to help keep her account growing and providing people across the world with simple, tasty recipes.
'My next step is a bigger and better version of a cookbook,' she said.
'I would love a hard copy book and to double the number of recipes in it. I had requests to start doing weekly meal plans for people with shopping lists which I would love to do for my followers.'
She also has some trips planned for the rest of the year where she will take her TikTok with her after the success of her recently documented trips to Italy, Greece and Dublin trying different foods.