With her blog, Nikita Varma hopes to make people aware of diverse cuisines

Nikita Varma believes in being consistent with content across platforms while giving people information about specific domains.

Spending about five to six hours in a day to create food-related content, sometimes more, Nikita Varma tries to balance work with the comfort of eating light at home. Her efforts mostly go into ensuring her content is informative and introduces people to new things.

Looking back, where did it all begin?

Over two years ago while working on a project at TOI, I came across the concept of food blogging. I am a food lover and looking at the pictures and posts of food bloggers, I got inspired to post pictures of my food. Honestly, I never thought it might become this big.

What's in the name?

The name of my page, I am dating food, clearly states how much I love food. I have always been around good food and foodies since my childhood! My mom is a great cook and all of us in our family are big-time foodies, which made food an essential part of my life. I really wanted to keep some fancy name and this was the best name I could relate to.

What is your USP in this cluttered space? How does your content give you an edge?

My USP is being informative. I had always been a curious child who asked a lot of questions. I believe in collecting all the information about the food I am eating, which I can share with my followers. There are so many dishes and cuisines people are still not aware of, some don't try new dishes because they are hesitant/sceptical. I want to help people experiment with new dishes, introducing them with the help of my experiences.

Please take us through your content creation process. How do you stay relevant & relatable?

I believe in creating content that has a long shelf life. I like fine dining, cafes and luxury dining spaces over street food, so I create most of the content at these places. To be relatable, I try to share homemade food recipes, budget-friendly restaurants and interact with my audience to know what they would like to know about.

How do you make moolah with your efforts?

I mostly make money through brand promotions and creating content for various apps and brands.

How do you maintain editorial objectivity with the influx of brand briefs?

It's very important to make a connection with your audience and I believe in promoting products that are actually benefiting or helping my followers. They are all tried and tested. I try to be informative and relatable so that people can understand if they really need it or not.

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One instance/experience that made it all worthwhile.

One day I was hanging out with my friends at a cafe and a girl came up saying, 'Are you Nikita Varma?' and she hugged me saying you are an inspiration to me. I hear lots of people telling me every other day that you are an inspiration, which is the biggest thing to me. It has happened a lot of times that people come to meet me, click selfies, these are the best moments and worth all the hard work I put on my blog.

Weirdest brand brief/request ever.

There are so many such requests, you won't believe! In the food blogging industry, some PRs and restaurants expect you to write about them in exchange for just free gifts/food. They should know how it works before asking for getting published on my page. It's just illogical.

If not blogging, you would be?

I would have been working as a journalist or marketer.

A day in your life...

I wake up at 6 am, hit the gym, get back home, complete my paperwork. After that around 1 pm, I leave from home to create content. It takes around 5-6 hours to do so, sometimes more if I am doing streetfood. It takes a lot of effort to balance the lifestyle while eating out as somewhere it does affect our body and skin. So I try to eat light at home, which mostly includes fruits, salads and boiled food.

Message/tips for upcoming bloggers.

Respect your content and work. Work on your content every day, be creative and innovative. Try to be regular, be it on Blog/Instagram/YouTube. Travel and try to be informative, you can be informative only if you are well-read and have experience around the topic.

Your Favourite Influencer

Masoomminawala and Brunchboys.

The future you foresee for your personal brand.

I want to work really hard and learn a lot of things to build my blog into a bigger brand. Currently, I am trying to learn more about YouTube and want to focus on all the social media platforms instead of just one.