Sorted Food: 16 Years on YouTube, by the Numbers

Sorted Food is one of the oldest food channels on YouTube that is still growing. Four school friends from Hertfordshire started it in 2010; sixteen years later it publishes almost every day and its videos reach a larger share of its subscribers than most food channels manage. This profile traces that growth through dated, independent reporting and checks what the channel’s public numbers look like now.

How it started

The founders are Jamie Spafford, Ben Ebbrell, Mike Huttlestone and Barry Taylor, school friends from Potters Bar. Spafford told The Independent in 2015 that food “was the one conversation we kept coming back to, realising how bad all our diets were, whether it was takeaway food or microwaved meals” (The Independent, September 27, 2015). Their format is a conversation between friends rather than a chef demonstrating. “It’s not like you have a TV chef standing there saying, ‘This is how you make…’ something,” he said.

The YouTube channel was created on March 14, 2010, according to its own About panel (YouTube, @sortedfood).

Growth, measured at three points

Date	Subscribers	Source
March 2014	“just over 700,000”	The Guardian
September 2015	1.3 million	The Independent
October 2026	3.01 million	YouTube channel page, read October 28, 2026

In 2014 The Guardian ranked the group fourth in its list of “the top 30 young people in digital media”, noting that they had “more subscribers than Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay combined” at the time. In 2015 it was one of two British channels chosen as the stars of an advertising campaign by YouTube itself, with ads running on sites including ITV’s and Channel 4’s, and The Independent reported a staff of 11, studios near Tower Bridge and “long-term sponsorships” with Kenwood and Tesco.

That is slow, steady growth: roughly a quadrupling over twelve years, not a sudden spike. Sudden spikes are what bought subscribers usually look like, so a curve like this is reassuring.

What it is now

On October 28, 2026 the channel’s About panel showed 3,015 videos and 1,540,709,870 total views. The company’s website, run by Sorted Ventures Ltd, now lists a food show, a cooking app called Sidekick, live events and a newsletter (sortedfood.com).

We measured the channel’s recent uploads as part of our study of 312 big YouTube channels.

Measure (October 28, 2026)	Sorted Food	Typical food channel in our study
Subscribers (as YouTube displays them)	3.01M	—
Median views per long-form upload	596K	—
Views per subscriber	19.8%	7.8%
Like rate (likes ÷ views)	2.40%	2.40%
Long-form uploads, last 30 days	14	3.5
Median views per Short	34K	—

Two things stand out. The pace: 14 long-form videos in 30 days, against a median of 3.5 for the 60 food channels we measured. And the reach: each video earns views equal to about a fifth of the subscriber count, which puts Sorted Food in the top quarter of food channels. Its like rate sits exactly on the food median. Its Shorts do far worse than its long-form videos, a pattern we found on most channels (Shorts vs long-form data).

Because it posts so often, the 15 uploads in our window cover only a month, so the newest are still collecting views. The chart shows them as they stood on October 28.

Brand deals

Sorted Food has been open about sponsorship from the start. The Independent named Kenwood and Tesco as long-term sponsors in 2015. None of the 15 long-form descriptions in our October window used an explicit sponsorship phrase such as “sponsored by”, which is the test our study uses; a disclosure made in the video itself would not show up in that test. For brands considering a food channel, the public numbers above are the useful part: a high posting rate with views that hold up.

What our checker would add

Sorted Food is on YouTube, one of the two platforms our free authenticity checker can score. We did not run it for this article, so nothing here is or implies a score for the channel. Run it yourself at /check/youtube/sortedfood; the methodology explains what it measures.

The bottom line

Sorted Food’s story can be followed through independent coverage from 2014 and 2015 and through YouTube’s own numbers today, and they agree: a channel that grew gradually, still publishes most days, and reaches far more of its subscribers per video than a typical food channel. If you are comparing food creators for a campaign, our food YouTubers directory lists more channels you can check the same way.

Sources: The Guardian, “The top 30 young people in digital media: Nos 10-1”, March 17, 2014; The Independent, “SortedFood: Four friends become stars of huge advertising campaign”, September 27, 2015; sortedfood.com; YouTube channel About panel; YouTube’s public upload feeds for the channel, read October 28, 2026 (study dataset).