How a Disney World superfan made a career out of reviewing theme park food

This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Find our full episode on work-life balance here.

When people ask AJ Wolfe what she does for work, she usually just says she’s a travel writer or that she runs websites, because not many people consider being an expert on the Disney theme parks is a “real” job. 

“Unless you’ve traveled to Disney World and you … understand the kind of passion and dedication that people have for the Disney parks, you don’t really understand that there would be a whole job in this,” Wolfe said. “I’m pretty sure that my mother-in-law still doesn’t really think I have a job.”

When she was growing up,  she fell in love with the parks after her parents took her to Disney World every few years. She continued to visit the parks when she was in college in the 1990s, either with friends or by herself. 

In the early 2000s, she met her now-husband, and they started websites together as a shared hobby. One of their websites, Disney Food Blog, became really popular.. 

At the time, Disney World did not publish menus for their restaurants, so even though theme park visitors might end up paying thousands of dollars on food, they would not know what to expect. 

Wolfe would go to Disney World once or twice a month and try as much food as possible — multiple meals at as many as seven restaurants a day, “kind of like Pokemon, like collecting them all, making sure you had pictures of every food item you possibly could at Disney World.” 

This was in 2009, so it was before Instagram and an established culture of food influencers taking pictures of dishes. Wolfe carried a big digital camera around taking pictures of more food than one person could possibly eat. 

“I got a lot of kind of dirty looks from people — people not understanding what I was doing, thinking I was being real weird, which I was, and definitely got comments from servers like, ‘are you sure you want that much food? That’s a lot of food.'”

She would stay in the parks from 8 a.m. to 11p.m., sometimes going to a bar with dueling pianos to edit photos and write posts because it would help her stay awake.

When she was not in the parks, she wrote guides and planned future trips. At first, the site would publish a few posts a week. Now they publish 20 posts a day, with contributions from a team of 50 people. They review food, but also write guides, cover Disney news, and make videos for their YouTube channel, which has more than a million subscribers. 

Wolfe said it is the best job, but it is still a job. And the work never really stops, not even when her son was born 11 years ago. She recalled being in the hospital after she had given birth, and Disney World released the menus for the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival. She got out her computer to work on a post about the new menus, the nurses came in, and she had to explain why she was working the day after giving birth. 

She recalled another hectic time in 2019, when Disneyland opened Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. 

“I think I probably slept maybe an hour in like two days, and I would set my alarm for 12 minute naps just so that I could keep going,” she said. “There are things like that that are urgent, in the moment … You got to cover all of it as quickly as you possibly can.” 

The team all work remotely, and she tells her employees that working for them is like working for a news organization — they should set their own boundaries for work life balance but sometimes they will need to cover news at odd times, such as when a large animatronic dragon caught on fire during a night time show.  

Wolfe said there have often been moments when she felt like doing this work is all too much, but so far she has pushed through the difficult times, and she still goes to the parks for fun. 

“I still have a blast. And it’s even more fun knowing that I don’t have to work — that I can sort of shut off and not really care necessarily what’s happening around me, and instead just enjoy my family, or my friends or whoever I’m there with,” she said. “I enjoy it even more than I used to because I’m able to shut off and not have to consume everything that I’m seeing and process it.”