Ways to earn money cooking vegan food in 2026!
Turn your love for cooking into a business!
Vegan chef, catering, and pop-ups, are awesome niches to get into!
The cool thing about being a chef is you really don’t need to have formal expensive training.
If you got it, you got it!! I have a few vegan chef friends and they are amazing cooks. I don’t really care if they have a culinary education or not, and most clients don’t either!
Vegan catering
You do have the opportunity to stand out amongst your competition. Most catering companies are animal-based.
More and more people are health conscious and are looking for healthy food options for their events. Hook up with local organic farmers and plan your menu based on what is available during the season. Farm to cater style!!
Vegan pop-ups
Vegan pop-ups are great vegan business ideas and you can do it in your home, often called social dining or peer to peer eating, who knew it was a thing!
It’s when people who don’t know each other come together and have a dining experience. There are heaps of apps out there to help unite people with chefs. The cool thing about doing something like this is you can do it as much or as little as you would like!
Instead of inviting guests to your home, invite people to a venue. People are looking for different experiences, so if you set up the right atmosphere and get creative with table settings, etc, it can be a success.
You’ll start to get known and people will be booking your events. Invite musicians and other vendors to give it that extra flavor! Pun intended:)
Festivals and farmers’ markets are also popular places to pop up your vegan joint and sell your offerings. This is a really great opportunity to make a steady income because there are vegan pop-ups all over the place and you can be a consistent vendor.
Professional meal prepper for plant-based clients
This is an ideal job because you can set your hours and decide who you want to work with.
Many people are busy and don’t have the time to cook for themselves or their families, and it’s becoming quite common to hire someone to do your meal prep.
The chefs usually buy everything they need for their clients in advance.
Normally a meal chef prepper goes to the client’s home to prepare the food. It takes them about an hour or so to prep everything.
Once everything is prepped, they start cooking and preparing the food which takes a couple of hours or more.
Everything is then placed into containers to last them for the week, and then clean-up happens. It’s about a 2-6 hour job depending on much food you need to prepare.
You can charge different rates depending upon how much you need to cook and how long it will take. Many people in this type of field don’t charge by the hour they charge a flat fee. It makes sense to do it that way because there is driving time, shopping time communicating time, etc.
Vegan Retreat Chef
If you are a vegan chef and like to travel, this is an ideal job! There are hundreds and thousands of retreats happening all around the world that hire vegan chefs to take care of their retreat guests.
It’s a great opportunity to travel to amazing places meet up with amazing people and do what you do best!
Vegan Food Truck Chef
A really good alternative to opening a restaurant is starting a vegan food truck. Food trucks are still earning money despite the underlying pandemic issues.
In these uncertain times where restaurants are taking a hard hit by COVID 19, food trucks are staying afloat and in some cases are doing really well and their business is way up.
People want to get out and enjoy some good food without taking the chance of dining in. Food trucks are an essential business, so they are allowed to operate.
Many chefs are parking their food trucks in areas that help front-line workers and delivery truck drivers to help out in a time of need.
Especially along the highway, truck drivers can’t stop for a break and grab a bite to eat because most restaurants are closed, so food trucks are getting permission to park in the restaurant’s parking lot.
Online cooking classes
In the midst of the pandemic, many people are staying home and trying to fill up their days doing new things to overcome the burden that comes along with being home-bound. Offering cooking classes online is an in-demand niche, and are earning chefs money too.
Many chefs aren’t able to work like they used to because of all the restrictions, so they are working on creating digital landscapes where people can tune in from all over the world for a small price.
Get your plant-based business online.
The business aspect of starting your own business is challenging for most peeps.
It doesn’t have to be! Let me help you get your business set up online so you can focus on serving your clients and start earning money from your website by offering online cooking classes, affiliate marketing blogging, downloadable recipes, consulting advice.
80% of customers search online before buying products or services, so a web presence is essential.
Businesses that are online growing 40% faster than businesses that aren’t.
I know some business owners who rely on Facebook to be their site instead of an actual website. It’s better than nothing, but it means you’re not as findable online and it’s not as user-friendly for your audience as an actual website is.
