Meet the mum behind My Kids Lick the Bowl

Mum of four and nutritionist Stacey Kemeys, has built an online empire from her kitchen bench, one lick of the bowl at a time. 

Words + Photography Alice Veysey

As a parent who is preparing food for your growing family day in and day out, your aim is always to find appealing AND nutritious meal and snack options everyone will eat. You know you’re onto a winner when your kids want to savour the goodness left behind in prep by licking the bowl. For Tauranga mum of four Stacey Kemeys, she’s managed to make a thriving business out of this very concept. 

Stacey’s online business, aptly named My Kids Lick The Bowl delivers kid-friendly healthy recipes to a worldwide audience. She’s been featured by the likes of CNN and the Huffington Post and her crowd-pleasing meal solutions have become a go-to for many young families closer to home as well. 

Having studied human nutrition and dietetics at Otago University, Stacey spent her early career years working in hospitals as a clinical dietician and then with a medical nutrition product company. She took a break to have babies while her husband Mike continued work as a property developer. Stacey found that having three children close together and then adding a fourth made her re-think the idea of going back to a traditional 9-5 job. 

“Once I had young kids, I found myself on social media a fair bit more (at night when I was breastfeeding usually) and there were so many people asking questions about infant formula. There was a scarcity of real information, but there also seemed to be a lot of non-evidence based and quite judgy 'advice' around, and mums seemed very stressed.” She adds, “I thought if other people are writing articles about nutrition topics and popping them online, why can't I? So one of the first articles I wrote was a non-biased informative article on all the different infant formulas and what the ingredients actually were in them.” 

Stacey went on to write more articles and began sharing her own recipes, which eventually birthed her online business. These days recipe development is her main thing. “I try to make easy recipes that don't need too many fancy ingredients. I also focus on ensuring I have ingredient substitutions for allergy families.” 

Stacey’s love for food and involving her kids with baking and meal prep is evident when you see her at work, which she does from home. During our photoshoot, she had prepped multiple foody projects that spanned across the kitchen. All four kids were keen to get stuck in, adding their own flavours and suggestions along the way. 

Stacey has involved the kids in food prep since they were very young. They accompany her on supermarket trips, helping make selections and can now confidently follow recipes themselves. Exposing the kids to a variety of different foods from early on has definitely helped ward off pickiness although they still all have different likes and dislikes. Some are quite adventurous eaters, and others are a bit more fussy by nature. There’s no cover all rule for getting kids to eat everything. One of Stacey’s kids is celiac too, so this creates endless opportunities for gluten free experimentation. 

The Kemeys kids each have their specialties in the kitchen. Archer, 13, is the breakfast guy – loaded omelets are his thing. Ada, 11, likes to bake, and Eloise, 10, is a poached egg champ. Baby of the family, Esme, 6, is all about smoothies at the moment. 

The kids are of course Stacey’s taste testers and harshest critics. They sample her new recipes before she sends them out into the world. If they’re not all on board after tasting a new creation, there will be some recipe tweaking or sometimes it’s even back to square one. Once all four kids give their thumbs up to a recipe, it gets a green light and is sent to the web. From there the recipe takes on its own life! 

Stacey now has two part time employees. There’s a kitchen assistant who helps on content creation days, prepping ingredients and helping with dishes while Stacey cooks, photographs and videos new recipes. Then there’s a content assistant who helps Stacey schedule content to social media and checks through the recipes Stacey writes. 

Stacey has taught herself food styling and photography along the way and has learnt about Search Engine Optimisation and best practices to gain and keep her online audience. She makes the bulk of her income from the advertising on her website, managed by a content network. Readers love her user-friendly website, as they can search for recipes based on ages and stages, meal types, specific ingredients or allergy provisions. 

Stacey receives up to 300 emails a day which can range from ‘thanks for the recipe’ to more in-depth questions which require further thought to respond to. Though keeping up with this side of the business can be quite time consuming for Stacey, she finds it so rewarding to connect with her audience and gain the feedback from her work. 

She shares that now all her kids are at school, she has a bit more time to focus on the business and is working on a few new ways for people to access her recipes whilst also looking into growth opportunities. 

When asked what advice she’d give to mums looking to start their own online businesses, Stacey shares “know going into it that upfront the work can be a lot without much financial reward while you get set up. But then over time there’s opportunity for the income to become more passive which means you have greater flexibility. Ultimately, if you’re creating content, it needs to be helpful and serve your audience, it's not just about being an 'influencer'”. 

Stacey has worked hard for a number of years to create a substantial catalogue of recipes. With brand partnership opportunities and advertisers seeking exposure on her website due to her expansive international readership, she’s found a win-win situation – sharing her content freely to an appreciative audience, and the revenue flows in. 

Stacey has also recently launched a second website, fullerbowl.com. 

Fuller Bowl focusses less on the kids and more on the mums, because let's face it, sometimes we like to lick the bowl too. 

Visit mykidslickthebowl.com, fullerbowl.com,  & follow @my_kids_lick_the_bowl & @my_fuller_bowl on Instagram