Community Corner

From Fashionista to Foodie

Allie Coremin went from fashion school to food blogger, and is now working her way into the food industry.

Allie Coremin didn’t plan to become a food blogger.

In fact, she went to school for fashion, held internships in New York, even got a degree from Philadelphia University in fashion industry management.

But Coremin remembers exactly when she realized staying in the fashion world wasn’t her thing.

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She was finishing up an internship in Manhattan, where she spent plenty of time gazing out at restaurants during cab rides around the city, and her boss asked her who her favorite designer was.

“My mind went blank,” Coremin, who now works as a restaurant server, said.

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All she could think of was her favorite foodies and her favorite show on the Food Network.

A devout reader of food blogs, she launched her own–All I Eat Food–in June of last year, on the heels of losing 20 pounds. She conceived it as a way to share the healthy side of food, and started posting three times a day, but things quickly changed.

“It morphed more into me giving out interesting recipes and talking more about going out to eat,” Coremin said, adding that she tries to include a story behind every recipe to keep her readers interested.

She joked that her mom and a few friends were the only readers initially, but her readership is growing, though not everyone has found out about her online life.

“Some of my friends still say, ‘Wait, you have a website?’” Coremin said.

Joining up with Foodbuzz, a food blog community, in October opened up a lot of doors for Coremin. She jetted to San Francisco for a Foodbuzz’s blogger convention in November, scored a POM Wonderful-sponsored dinner party and is in the running for a POM Wonderful cupcake contest that wraps up Monday–you can check out her cupcake and vote on the POM website.

Becoming a member of Foodbuzz and meeting up with other food bloggers also got her past her biggest hurdle: whipping out a camera at the dinner table to document the evening’s meal, especially at restaurants.

“At first, I was always so embarrassed to take pictures,” Coremin said. “I’d wait for the server to leave before taking out the camera.”

Being alongside hundreds of bloggers in San Francsisco–with everyone shooting pictures of food, no matter the situation–got her past that, though.

While she’s making some money from her blog, she sees it more as a jumping-off point, a way to get herself into the food industry.

Coremin said she’s interested in a wide range of food-related jobs, anything from being a personal chef to being a food stylist on photo shoots, and wouldn’t mind seeing herself on a reality show like The Next Food Network Star.

For now, though, she’ll work on her blog and see where that takes her.

“I just kept thinking to myself, ‘OK, if I can just get (the blog) started, other opportunities will arise,’” she said.


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