Publication: BBC Food
Topics: Food and drink, health, nutrition, lifestyle, food trends, personal experiments, budgeting, relationships with food, personal transformations and lessons learned.
Rate (USD): Approximately $270+ for 800 words (rates start at £200; USD equivalent varies with exchange rates).
Deadline: Ongoing; no specific deadline provided.

BBC Food is seeking first-person feature pitches from writers with compelling personal experiences, practical insights or stories that can help readers make informed decisions about food and drink.

The editorial team is particularly interested in stories with an emotional hook or an achievable win. This could be a personal transformation, an experiment you conducted over several weeks, an unexpected discovery or a significant mistake that taught you something useful.

Importantly, editors are looking beyond cooking techniques and recipes. They want stories exploring how food connects with health, everyday life, changing habits, popular trends and household budgets.

BBC Food publishes recipes, health and dietary guidance, food culture stories and practical advice designed to help readers navigate their food choices. Its editorial coverage includes nutrition questions, food trends, personal experiences and ways to eat well without overspending.

Pay starts at £200 for an 800-word feature.

What BBC Food Wants to Publish

Jess Carter and Polly Weeks are interested in first-person stories that combine a genuine personal experience with a clear takeaway for readers.

Potential angles include:

• Personal transformations: How changing your eating habits affected your energy, wellbeing, routine or relationship with food.
• Food experiments: What happened when you tried a particular food-related habit for a month and documented the results.
• Mistakes and failures: A food or nutrition decision that went wrong, what you learned and what other people can take away from the experience.
• Food and health: Personal experiences exploring nutrition questions, eating habits and the impact of food on everyday wellbeing.
• Food trends: Trying a popular diet, ingredient or food trend and examining what the experience actually taught you.
• Budget and lifestyle: Practical ways to reduce food spending, change shopping habits or make everyday food choices more manageable.

These are suggested directions based on the brief, not confirmed assignments. Your pitch should be grounded in your own experience and offer a specific benefit to readers.

How to Pitch BBC Food

1. Find a compelling personal angle. Avoid simply proposing an article about healthy eating or saving money on groceries. Explain what happened to you, what you tried, what surprised you or what you learned.

2. Make the reader benefit clear. BBC Food is looking for features that help or inspire its audience. Show how your experience could help readers solve a problem, reconsider a popular belief or try a manageable change.

3. Research existing coverage. Read the BBC Food articles archive before pitching. Look at its existing stories on nutrition, food trends, budgeting and personal experiments. Identify a fresh angle rather than repeating an article already published.

4. Be specific about your evidence. For an experiment, explain how long you tried it, what you tracked and what the results were. For a personal failure, describe the lesson and why it matters beyond your own story. Avoid unsupported health claims.

5. Send a concise, tailored email. Introduce your proposed headline or angle, summarise the personal experience behind it, explain the reader benefit and include relevant writing experience or links to published work. Ask whether the editor would be interested in the idea.