While the downside of social media is one that Poppy O’Toole has had to get used to pretty quickly, the upside of it thrust her into the public eye overnight. She shot to TikTok fame during the 2020 lockdown with recipe videos (usually focused on the humble potato), and when one of her postings garnered her 1 million followers in a mere 24-hour period, things clearly weren’t going to be the same again. Having been made redundant from her position as a junior sous chef thanks to Covid, she had rent to pay and thought she’d give it a go.
“I started doing random videos online because my younger brother and sister were on TikTok,” she tells me, “And in the words of Dua Lipa, ‘it was a lot of hard work and a bit of luck.’ It was the right place and time for a girl to get on the food scene.” Poppy started posting food videos online, and her first job offer came in: “It was like £100 to post something.
I didn’t realise then that there was money in social media, but I thought, I’m going to just go for it. I figured maybe I could at least pay my rent.” Two weeks in, she had 4000 followers.
Then, “I did a compilation of potato videos with a voiceover, and I got 1 million followers overnight. It was just a little three-second recipe of potatoes with me talking. It wasn’t even a recipe.
It was just pictures of potatoes, and that’s when I realised I had started something.” The 29-year-old was born in a town outside of Birmingham called Bromsgrove and gre.
