Behind the Disney Food Blog: How One Woman Made a Career Out of Eating at Walt Disney World
If you’ve ever done the slightest bit of research on where to dine while planning a Walt Disney World vacation, chances are you’ve ended up on the Disney Food Blog.
The site, started by Texas resident AJ Wolfe in 2009, boasts the most comprehensive inventory of unbiased reviews of the ever-expanding food options at Disney parks, and attracts millions of monthly readers, YouTube viewers, and followers across social media platforms.
But before purple churros were going viral and Dole Whip came in doughnut form, food at Disney parks was mostly an afterthought. “Basically the only sites out there were the big, broad one that were covering everything in Disney, and no one was covering food in depth,” Wolfe tells PEOPLE. “There was almost a stigma attached to talking about food because people thought it was weird to care so much about Disney restaurants. I remember thinking, ‘Will people read this? Is that going to be weird? Who would ever go read a site about Disney food?’”
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Like many Disney bloggers that popped up around that time period, though, Wolfe quickly found that there was an appetite—quite literally, in her case—among adults with a nostalgia for all things Disney. “[The parks] have some iconic foods that people are addicted to, and that’s a big part of their vacation: They’re going to get Dole Whip, they’re going to get Mickey bars, they’re going to get turkey legs,” she says. “Quickly we started to see Disney catch on and realize that food was a part of the destination.”
