Sorted Food

Sorted Food (often styled SORTEDfood) is a British food media company and YouTube channel founded in 2010 by four school friends from just outside London, Barry Taylor, Ben Ebbrell, Jamie Spafford, and Mike Huttlestone, who combine cooking instruction with entertainment formats such as battles, taste tests, and challenges.^{1 • 2} The channel has grown from student-era how-to videos into what the company describes as a large online food community, supported by a recipe subscription app called Sidekick, cookbooks, and live events.³

Origins

The four founders met at secondary school and went to different universities. Meeting up in the holidays, they complained about the food they were eating; the only one who could cook was Ben Ebbrell, who was training to be a chef, and he began writing recipes for the others on the backs of beer mats. Realizing the recipes were not difficult to follow, they decided to share the experience more widely.⁴

They chose YouTube, filming themselves making the recipes to share with their friendship group. At the time, few creators were making food content on the platform, and early collaborations with larger YouTubers helped grow their audience.¹ The first video went up in 2010 and showed how to make a homemade pizza; the website followed as a place to host the recipes that accompanied the videos.⁴ The earliest videos were filmed in a barn belonging to a friend of Barry's father, fitted with what the team describes as the cheapest of cheap kitchens.¹⁰

The division of labor has been consistent: Ben is the chef, Jamie handles marketing and communications, Barry is a photographer and designer who leads the website and products, and Mike leads content.⁴

Growth and audience

The channel's subscriber count traces its expansion. It passed 1 million subscribers by late 2014, when Jamie Spafford described it as the biggest cooking channel on YouTube.⁴ By November 2015 it had reached 1.3 million subscribers and 150 million views.¹¹ A 2015 Google case study recorded 1.29 million subscribers, 5.5 million views per month, and 21.0 million minutes watched per month as six-month averages, with subscribers accounting for two thirds of viewership.¹² By 2021 the channel had almost 3 million YouTube followers, 270,000 Instagram followers, and 180,000 Twitter followers, and its paid membership option had grown more than 300% in a year.⁸ As of October 2026, tracking services put the channel at about 3.01 million subscribers and 1.54 billion total views.⁶

Community-driven content. The founders attribute the channel's direction to its audience. A weekly format called Fridge Cam, a video diary filmed at the team's fridge, let them take questions and suggestions directly from viewers, and recipes, tips, and international food trips were shaped by what the community asked for.¹² Ben Ebbrell described the dynamic in 2015: with only one chef in the team, he had feared running out of recipes until he realized that over a million people were contributing to the next one.¹²

Collaboration has been a growth strategy since the beginning. The channel's first collaboration, with UK vlogger charlieissocoollike when Sorted was six months old, quadrupled its audience overnight, and collaborations outside the food category, including with Grace Helbig and Rhett & Link on Good Mythical Morning, produced large subscriber spikes. Sweet treats drive discovery: 15 of the top 20 most-viewed Sorted recipe videos were about cakes or desserts, and the team's Cronuts video, released at the height of the craze, drove a subscriber increase nearly 20 times higher than a regular recipe video.¹²

Formats and content

The channel's stated motto is that each video should be entertaining, educational, and inspirational in varying amounts. How-to videos lean educational, while Fridge Cam is lighter and features unorthodox creations such as a tomato soup cake.⁴ Over time the output has broadened from recipe instruction to ingredient and gadget reviews, challenges, battles, and taste tests, with the four hosts playing trained chefs against ordinary home cooks.^{2 • 13} Recurring formats include budget battles, in which a chef on a fixed small budget competes against a normal with no limit, and speed challenges such as the Sub-10 Minute Burger Challenge.¹³

The company has also worked with broadcasters and brands. In 2015, NBC's TODAY partnered with SORTEDfood for the expansion of Today.com/Food, sending the group across the United States to feature food stories on the morning show.¹⁴ Brand partners have included Kraft Heinz and BASF, with the latter collaboration used to gauge audience attitudes toward farming and sustainability.⁸ In June 2026, Fox Creator Studios announced a partnership with Sorted Food among seven creator channels, with a Sorted project as the studio's first production.¹⁵

Publishing and products

Sorted published two self-published cookbooks before signing a mainstream deal with Penguin Books in February 2012.⁵ In 2017 the cookbook Desserts in Duvets was funded directly through its audience on Kickstarter, the same year the channel won Best Online Content at the UK Blog Awards.⁵ In 2020 the company launched a subscription-based meal packs app designed to help members plan dinners on small budgets with little time and less food waste; it has since been developed into Sidekick, described by the company as an all-in-one kitchen companion app covering planning, shopping, and cooking.^{8 • 3} The company also runs Sorted Live events and, under the Co-incidence partnership, has planned a physical Sorted Hub in London.¹⁶

Recognition and position

In 2026, the Sorted Food video "Exactly HOW MANY London Cooks Spoil the Broth? An Epic Chef Experiment!" won the People's Voice award in the Food & Drink (Series & Channels) category at the Webby Awards, alongside nominees including First We Feast and Mythical Kitchen.⁹ Within the cooking and food category on YouTube by subscribers, tracking data places Sorted Food around 52nd, well behind individual creator channels such as Nick DiGiovanni, but with an engagement rate of 2.0 comments per 1,000 views against a category average of 0.5.¹⁷ In August 2026, Ben Ebbrell cited the channel's 15 million monthly viewers in public comments against a UK proposal to boost traditional broadcasters' discoverability on video platforms, arguing it would undermine years of investment in building an audience while television had ignored YouTube's growth.⁷

References

1. Socially SORTED, New Business
2. Food Show, Sorted Food
3. About | Sorted
4. Can't cook, will cook: the story of SortedFood, The Guardian (22 November 2014)
5. Sorted Food, Creators On Record
6. Sorted Food YouTube Stats, vidIQ
7. Auntie v influencers: why YouTubers are ready for battle with the BBC, The Guardian (22 August 2026)
8. SORTEDfood: What one of the world's 'largest and most engaged food conversations' tells us about food trends, FoodNavigator (26 July 2021)
9. Food & Drink (Series & Channels), 2026 Webby Awards Winners
10. Happy 13th Birthday To Us!, Sorted Food (14 March 2023)
11. Interview: Sorted Food Chef and Director Ben Ebbrell, The University Times (19 November 2015)
12. Case Study | SORTEDfood, Think with Google
13. Sorted Food Burgers: All 41 Burger Videos, Burgerman
14. Behind the scenes of TODAY's partnership with YouTube channel SORTEDfood, The Drum (9 July 2015)
15. Fox Creator Studios Partners With Josh Richards, Emelia Hartford and 5 More Top Creators, TheWrap (18 June 2026)
16. Sorted Food, Co-incidence
17. Sorted Food: subscribers, views and new videos, Trari

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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