Nine food channels, by the numbers: what YouTube’s public statistics show
From a chef with 46 million subscribers to a Belgian food-story channel eighteen months old, the public counters tell a consistent story about what a food channel’s uploads are worth. We pulled the figures for nine channels on the same day.
Public statistics are the only numbers every YouTube channel shares with the world: subscribers, uploads and lifetime views, printed on the channel page and served by the platform’s Data API. On September 25, 2026, we pulled those three figures for nine food channels at the same moment, from a chef with 46 million subscribers to a Belgian food-story channel that is eighteen months old. Read together, they say something consistent about what an upload is worth.
How the figures were gathered
Every number below comes from the YouTube Data API’s channel statistics, retrieved on September 25, 2026. “Uploads” is the platform’s public video count. “Views” is lifetime public views across the channel. Subscriber counts are rounded by YouTube before they are published. Two derived columns, views per upload and views per subscriber, are simple divisions of those figures and describe a channel’s history, not its current pace.
One caveat applies to every row. Since March 31, 2025, YouTube counts a Shorts view at the moment playback starts, with no minimum watch time, as explained here. Views on Shorts before and after that date are not measured identically, and the lifetime totals mix both.
The nine channels
The channels were chosen to span the genre: recipe and technique channels, cooking-as-performance channels, a food-theory channel and a food-story channel. Each one’s own description is quoted where it helps.
| Channel | Created | Subscribers | Uploads | Views | Views per upload | Views per subscriber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nick DiGiovanni | 2016 | 46.6 million | 576 | 23.75 billion | 41.2 million | 510 |
| Bayashi TV | 2021 | 37.2 million | 1,709 | 28.34 billion | 16.6 million | 762 |
| Zach Choi | 2014 | 33.7 million | 1,219 | 15.39 billion | 12.6 million | 457 |
| albert_cancook | 2020 | 29.2 million | 990 | 28.47 billion | 28.8 million | 975 |
| Gordon Ramsay | 2006 | 22.0 million | 2,131 | 4.71 billion | 2.2 million | 214 |
| Cooking With Lynja | 2013 | 15.2 million | 486 | 6.06 billion | 12.5 million | 399 |
| Joshua Weissman | 2014 | 10.7 million | 830 | 2.57 billion | 3.1 million | 240 |
| The Food Theorists | 2020 | 5.5 million | 430 | 1.22 billion | 2.8 million | 222 |
| PopcornTheory | 2025 | 187,000 | 335 | 685.6 million | 2.0 million | 3,666 |
What the columns say
Uploads and views do not move together. Gordon Ramsay, whose channel describes itself as “The home of Gordon Ramsay on YouTube. Recipe tutorials, tips, techniques and the best bits from the archives”, has the most uploads of the nine, 2,131, and the fifth-highest view total. Nick DiGiovanni has a quarter as many uploads and five times the views. Views per upload runs from about 2 million to about 41 million across the table.
Age is not the explanation. The two largest view totals belong to channels created in 2020 and 2021. albert_cancook, created in November 2020, and Bayashi TV, created in January 2021 and self-described as an “ASMR Cooking Video creator in Japan”, each passed 28 billion lifetime views in under six years. The Ramsay channel dates from 2006.
Views per subscriber separates the formats. The channels built on longer recipe and theory videos cluster between about 200 and 250 views per subscriber: Joshua Weissman, The Food Theorists, which promises “tasty theories, with just the right amount of spice”, and Ramsay. The performance-led channels sit between roughly 400 and 1,000. PopcornTheory, a Shorts-only channel whose entire description is “have some popcorn”, is the outlier at about 3,700 views per subscriber. That ratio is characteristic of channels whose views arrive through the Shorts feed, where most viewers are not subscribers.
Scale and ratio are different questions. PopcornTheory’s 685 million views are the smallest total in the table by a wide margin. Its views per upload, about 2 million, sit alongside Ramsay’s and The Food Theorists’. A channel eighteen months old with 335 uploads is, on that measure, returning what channels a decade older return per upload, from a subscriber base a hundredth of the size.
What the columns do not say
Lifetime totals hide time. A channel with 28 billion views may have earned most of them in one year or spread them over five; the API does not say, and this table does not claim to. Nor do public statistics say anything about revenue, watch time, or the engaged view counts that YouTube uses for its Partner Program thresholds. They are the numbers everyone can see, gathered on one day, and compared on their own terms.