Viva Chefs: A Hot Side Hustle For Good Cooks

If you have a passion for cooking, you could make great money plying your cooking skills through Viva Chefs.

What is Viva Chefs?

Viva Chefs is an online marketplace where people who want meals cooked for them at home can hire a chef to come in and do the cooking. Often, chefs are employed for several hours and make both meals for that night and to enjoy later.

How it works

You sign up by downloading the app on a smart phone, plugging in your name, address, cooking experience and the types of foods you cook.

You’ll then go more granular. This involves checking off — or adding — specific dishes in that category (i.e. Italian, Chinese, Indian, etc.) that you can make. You’ll then be asked to add a profile photo of you and multiple photos of the dishes you cook. Finally, you’ll set your hourly rates and availability.

The site will send a link to KarmaCheck to verify your work and criminal history. If all goes well, your profile will appear on the site and Viva Chefs will start connecting you with potential clients.

Viva Chefs review:

Viva Chefs is hard not to like. The site lets chefs set their own pay, decide the dishes they want to cook and determine their own schedules. Chefs do not need professional experience. But they will need to have set recipes and photographs of some of their dishes. Of course, some chefs on the site do have professional experience. So, if you don’t, it’s worth taking time to make a compelling case about why you’re a great option for someone looking for a home cook.

From the customer side, the site aims to make having a home chef affordable by encouraging customers to do a full week’s meal planning with one chef visit. So even though you may pay $200 or more to the chef, you could bank several days worth of meals for about the cost of a single night out.

Advantage for chefs

Viva Chefs also monitors how many chefs are available in any given area, limiting the number on the platform until they can ensure the existing chefs have enough business to make offering services here worthwhile. That’s a huge plus, since many platforms take all comers. And taking all comers tends to saturate the marketplace, sometimes with also-ran quality. And that leads to fewer bookings for everyone.

On the other hand, this policy also means that the site may put new chefs on a waitlist, rather than immediately publish their profiles. When consumer demand in your market rises enough to accommodate more chefs, they’ll contact you.

Viva Chefs CEO Ravi Yatnalkar, says the site’s management is high-touch, working with both chefs and clients to create a compelling value proposition on both sides.

The process

Once your profile is published on the site, clients can contact you to request meals. Typically, the client will pick a recipe from your list of dishes. You provide them with a shopping list that will allow you to cook 4 servings of that dish at their home. The client can choose to consume the meal that night or save it for later.

Often, however, clients will chose several dishes from your list. The client gets a grocery list and shops in advance. You’ll cook everything when you arrive and pack up most of the meals for later use.

This allows the chef to charge for more hours of cooking and allows the client to get several days worth of meal planning accomplished in one visit. That makes it more affordable for the client and more rewarding for the chef.

Chefs and clients are encouraged to chat prior to the cooking session to make sure that the customer has everything the chef will need, from pots and pans to knives and storage containers.

Shopping

The default mode is that the customer does all of the grocery shopping.

However, chefs can choose to offer a shopping service for an additional fee. If the chef does the shopping, the customer will be charged for the chef’s regular visit, plus the cost of groceries (the chef provides a receipt), plus a shopping fee that’s set by the chef.

Fees and commissions

Viva Chefs charges a 10% commission on your final pay, minus any tips. So you earn 90% of the pay you set, plus gratuities.

Pay

Chefs choose their own hourly rate, but most set that between $30 and $60 per hour, says Viva Chef’s Yatnalkar.

Generally speaking, you’ll be paid for several hours of work, depending largely on how many dishes the customer wants you to make and whether you’re doing the shopping or if they are.

Payments are made via Stripe about two days following a completed gig.

The challenge

Viva Chefs is a relatively new entrant into a tough market. The site launched in late 2024.

And although it has grown rapidly, offering chefs in many major markets across the country, it has yet to become a household name. Better brand recognition is needed in order to find enough customers to keep home chefs busy.

Right now, some chefs are cooking many meals a week, says Yatnalkar. Others only get one or two bookings.

Recommendations

Nonetheless, we like this site a lot and hope that it succeeds. You can sign up with Viva Chefs here.

If you want to book a chef, you can do that here.

However, if you want to make cooking a regular side gig, you may also want to also sign up with other cooking platforms, such as EatWith, Shef and Hotplate.

What their users say (from Apple App Store)

The platform makes it incredibly easy for me to showcase my dishes, connect with local food lovers, and grow my customer base — all from my own kitchen. The app is straightforward to use, from setting up menus to managing orders and communicating with customers.

Support is very attentive and managing clients is a breeze.