Meet Luise Vindah Andersenl, founder of Green Kitchen Stories

Tech and noms may not seem like they mesh, but like chocolate and peanut butter, they're compatible in every way.

Green Kitchen Stories is a delicious looking food blog all about living a healthier life through a plant-based diet. It's so much more than a recipes website. It's a place where you can find out about the joys of healthy eating, the beauty of colorful food, and the interesting lives that Luise and David and their three adorable kids lead. Their foodie adventures are everything you want to have for yourself.

After seeing success in the Green Kitchen Stories blog, the duo decided to curate some of their favorite recipes into an eye-catching app that makes you want to cook delicious meals just with the app icon. Once inside, your mouth begins to water as you browse through dozens of delectable vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free dishes.

$3.99 - Download now

Luise Vindahl Andersen is the chef half founder of Green Kitchen Stories (David is the design half) and a nutritional therapist. At a time when being vegetarian was an alternative lifestyle, she was inspiring home chefs to go back to farm fresh. Before Instagram turned your local coffee shop into a selfie hotspot, Luise and her husband were taking incredible food pictures that would put your favorite influencer to shame. Today, Green Kitchen Stories continues its successful journey of beautifully photographed food and personal adventures.

I was able to chat with Luise about the early days of Green Kitchen Stories, it's growth over the past decade, and how things have changed since her family more than doubled.

When you first started Green Kitchen Stories as a blog, did you have any notion that it would become a business?

No. I had no idea! It was just a fun little hobby adventure that we did. Our moms and a handful of friends were our only readers during the first months. But things took off quite quickly and I think it was a combination of our high-quality photos, good recipes (although we didn't test them more than once in the beginning), personal stories, and lucky timing. Since we started 10 years ago, vegetarian food has been on a constant rise. Being vegetarian today is a sign of modern and forward thinking, whereas 15 years ago it was more of a hippie thing and healthy vegetarian food was just a niche.

It's clear that, from the beginning, design aesthetic was an important part of Green Kitchen Stories. Did you have any experience with design, or where you just using your personal style?

David was working as a magazine art director and graphic designer so that definitely helped. At first, we just put a focus on the aesthetics because it was something we enjoyed, but it quickly became part of Green Kitchen Stories DNA. We realized that the prettier food and better-looking photos we had, the more people were intrigued to try our recipes and eat more vegetables. Today we have a more outspoken vision that our food and photos always should look so damn good that even if you aren't used to cooking and eating healthy vegetarian food, you'd want to give this a try.

What made you decide to make the Green Kitchen and Healthy Desserts apps?

When we launched Green Kitchen, most other cooking apps looked super boring and text heavy. It was just around the time when the first iPad launched and we wanted to create something much more inspirational. It was really fun to transform our blog content, as well as, bring new content into a new, interactive format that was super focused on inspiration and passion. The idea came up when we were contacted by two Swedish app developers, Jimmy Poppuu and Marthin Freij from Amazing Applications, who were looking for a partner for a digital cookbook concept and we have been working closely together ever since.

Why did you choose iOS over Android? Do you have any plans to make an Android version?

Just working on iOS has been great for us because we are such a small team and focusing on one platform was the only sustainable solution in the beginning. We have received lots of requests from Android users and it would be great to reach readers on all platforms, but every time we look at the numbers, staying on iOS makes the most sense from an economic perspective. Also, we are all avid Apple fans!

Talk about your experience running the business of Green Kitchen Stories while raising a family. Do you have any fun stories of how your kids have changed how you work/blog/cook?

Well, our business is a huge part of our family. The story part in Green Kitchen Stories is a natural telling of our lives and the company. The focus of our recipes has changed along with our family. The past few years of cooking and writing has been centered around a busy life with small children who are also constant food critics. If the food ends up on the floor, we probably decide to retest that recipe. We try to only work while they are in school/preschool, but as all small business owners know, work never stops. Emails are constantly coming in and every dinner is a recipe test. It is honestly pretty exhausting, but also super fun.

Being a food blogger before food blogging was popular, do you have any advice for someone thinking about starting a business doing something that doesn't seem very popular at the moment? Someone who wants to take a risk similar to what you did?

For the first couple of years, we didn't earn almost any money and we both had other day-jobs and wrote the blog on weekends and nights. It's cliche, but don't expect overnight success. Keep doing what you love because you love it, not because it will make you rich. Develop your skills and try to find your own style. Hard work pays off eventually, and honesty and transparency make you interesting to follow.