Welcome to Creators on the Rise, where we find and profile breakout creators who are in the midst of extraordinary growth. You can check out previous installments here.
Darlene Schrijver loves salads.
And not in the casual “has them once a week” way. In the every day, can-remember-life-stages-and-events-by-what-salads-she-ate kind of way. Schrijver’s always been into cooking, and salads have always been a big love–but they became an even bigger love when her daughter got into competitive weightlifting and ended up on Team USA, headed for the Olympics. To help her prepare for the world stage, Schrijver started making more and more salads at home.
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But then her daughter moved away for school. A friend of Schrijver’s offered a solution: Why didn’t she keep creating salad recipes, film them, and post the videos on TikTok for her daughter to follow at school?
She’s always on there anyway, the friend said. “That’s how I got started,” Schrijver says, “and it’s just taken off.”
Schrijver challenged herself to post for 30 days straight, and by the end of those 30 days, had acquired a tidy following, with comments full of people asking her to try this salad or try that salad, and could she come up with a salad featuring X and Y ingredients? She loved how interactive the community was, and before long, she had enough traffic to quit her day job in airline customer service and turn The Salad Lab (named for her daughter’s major, microbiology) into her full-time career.
Now, Schrijver has nearly 3 million followers tuning in for her salads, which range from her own personal favorite combos to celebrities’ recipes to restaurant dishes with an at-home twist. (She asked us for our favorite salad, and because we’re heathens we said something with turkey, brie, apples, and, uh, potato chips.) She’s still just as happy to hear from her community–and one thing she’s heard, almost constantly, is Where did you get your bowls?
Schrijver has always used big, glossy, handmade salad bowls in her videos. They’re simply the kind she likes to use. When it became clear they’re the kind other people would like to use, too, she teamed up with Viral Nation to find local artisans who could produce a bowl just as pretty as hers. That bowl is available now–and there are plans for more Salad Lab products in the future.
Check out our chat with Schrijver below.
@thesaladlab Pre-Order Sales are Live, LINK IN BIO, for the Official Salad Lab Bowl, order now for the holidays! Limited supply. #salad #thesaladlab #thesaladlabbowl #ordernow ♬ original sound – The Salad Lab
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Let’s start with a little bit of background about you. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your life before social media.
Darlene Schrijver: I don’t know how far you want me to go back. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I went to school in southern California. Met my husband down there and lived down there for 10 years. We had a flower shop growing up and so I wanted to get into the business side of it. I studied economics and then I ended up in municipal finance and merger and acquisitions. Then we moved up to Northern California because I wanted to get back up to Northern California with my job. We had landed in Sonoma County, which is wine country.
Ended up having two children. They’re both now college-age. The way I actually got started was my daughter requested my recipes when she went off to school and a girlfriend said, “Why don’t you throw them on TikTok? She’s always on there anyway.” That’s how I got started and it’s just taken off.
Tubefilter: Very interesting. Have you always been into cooking?
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. In fact, my daughter was part of the Team USA youth and junior Olympic weightlifting team. I was a momager.
Tubefilter: Lots of reasons to cook good food at home, then.
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. I had to prepare all her meals and work with dieticians and all that all the time. She loves salads, so that was my specialty.
Tubefilter: She was the inspiration. What makes salads so special to you?
Darlene Schrijver: I just love them too. They’re fresh. We have great produce in California. I love a good farmer’s market. It’s my happy place. That was always my specialty. Whenever I wanted to go out to lunch with girlfriends or anything, I always said, “Who has the best salad? Where can we get a good salad?”
Tubefilter: Did you expect anything to happen when you got on TikTok?
Darlene Schrijver: No! It was during COVID. Those first ones were in my pajamas, and just things I had around the house. She is a molecular biology major, and so I thought it would be fun to throw a little lab coat in there. Here I am in my lab coat now. [shows it off] And I added some beakers and test tubes and make it more fun.
It just caught on really fast. I suddenly had people requesting all different kinds of salads, and at the very beginning, I did it for a couple of days and my husband said, “Oh, you won’t last a week. You won’t last 10 days.” I challenged myself to posting for 30 days and I started getting all these requests for the Kardashian salad that they were shaking at the time. Then I went and researched it and it was the most-Googled thing people were looking for. I thought, “Oh, well, maybe I do have something here and I can start capitalizing on it.”
Tubefilter: At the end of the 30 days, was there a conscious decision to be like, “Okay, I’m going to keep doing this”?
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. I got a lot of encouragement and I had all these requests and I felt obligated to supply the requests. I was curious and it was fun and I was having a good time–I still am having a good time.
@thesaladlab Louis Vuitton’s Le Frank Style Carmelized Chicken Caesar Salad #salad #thesaladlab #saladsoftiktok #chickencaesar #carmelizedchickencaesar #louisvuitton #lefrank #chandon #havingfun ♬ Wes Anderson-esque Cute Acoustic – Kenji Ueda
Tubefilter: Good. That’s the most important thing, which I feel like a lot of people forget. Was there a particular video during those 30 days that took off?
Darlene Schrijver: Definitely the Kardashian salad was probably the one that really took me off and put me on the platform. It just grew exponentially right away. There was something that appealed to everybody that– I think also personally, I was looking for content that wasn’t making sourdough bread or dancing.
Tubefilter: [laughs] Sourdough had quite the year.
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. It had a chokehold on everybody. I thought it’d be fun to make salads and everybody came along with me for the ride.
Tubefilter: You have a distinct filming style. I’m really curious, did you watch TikTok before you started making videos? Did you have any experience in videography?
Darlene Schrijver: I did not. Back in the day, Apple used to give free photography classes. I’d taken one Apple iPhone photography class. I was never really into the whole Instagram taking pictures and posting and all that kind of thing, other than for my daughter’s sport and promoting her. That was my only experience behind that, and I took photography in high school, but no videography. Originally you had to split it all up and put it together and I’ve just tried to grow with the trends in industry and the software and CapCut and all that.
Tubefilter: I’m really surprised you had no experience. You had that style right away, the overhead shot.
Darlene Schrijver: At first they encouraged me, my support person over at TikTok, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” As it’s growing and developing, they want you to do all those different kinds of screenshots and everything. I’m slowly trying to incorporate that, but like– That overhead is my thing.
Tubefilter: It looks good. If you’re showing off a lot of fresh ingredients, it’s a very good way to do it.
Darlene Schrijver: Thanks.
Tubefilter: How much time goes into the average video for you, from planning out the recipe to getting everything together to filming to editing?
Darlene Schrijver: It’s about a five- or six-hour process. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I have to research, I have to create a recipe. I have to go to the grocery store sometimes twice, sometimes different stores. Again, the research, if it’s a celebrity, I pick their favorite beverages to pair with it and that kind of thing. Or I do research on what beverages or what wine goes well with some of the ingredients that are in the salad. That all takes time to research.
Then preparing everything takes at least– Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, sometimes it takes two hours, and then setting up. Filming itself only takes about 10 or 20 minutes at the most, and then editing can take forever. Editing takes another hour and then posting. The whole process.
@thesaladlab The Salad Lab Bowl LIB Halloween Pasta Salad with Roasted Garlic Dressing #pastasalad #thesaladlab #halloween #saladsoftiktok ♬ Halloween ・ cute horror song – PeriTune
Tubefilter: I know you said that originally you had a lot of people in your comments making suggestions for which salads to do next. I’m curious where your ideas come from for recipes these days.
Darlene Schrijver: They come from everywhere. I sit down and do a little brainstorming session and I see what’s trending. When Bella Hadid posted her salad, I was at the grocery store at eleven o’clock at night between the people that were buying cases of beer and ice cream, and I had arms full of salad ingredients. I try and follow the trends. I see what holidays there are. Every day is a day. It’s National Peanut Butter Day, or it’s National Whatever Day.
Then I also try and, if it’s Hispanic Heritage Month or LGBTQ month, I try and get at least one or two of those in. Different countries. I get lots of requests for different types of cultural salads, historic salads, famous restaurants that are shut down or don’t have their salad on the menu anymore, that kind of thing. It just comes from everywhere. Sometimes I just get creative and I’m walking past a bagel shop and it smells really good, and I think, “Oh, croutons,” and it becomes a salad.
Tubefilter: What’s been your favorite salad you’ve made so far?
Darlene Schrijver: It really changes with my mood. There’s probably, like most people, some of your favorites have an emotional tie to them. One of my favorites is a chicken kale with a honey tobasco dressing and feta. It’s one that my daughter used to love and we used to go to this restaurant and always have it. That’s one of my all-time favorites.
Tubefilter: Sounds excellent. I think the first one I ever saw of yours was Anna Wintour’s caprese salad.
Darlene Schrijver: Oh, yes. It’s also fun to research those. She doesn’t eat any vegetables in her salad, and that kind of thing. I’m constantly learning new tips and tricks and things to pass on to everybody, and it’s just a lot of fun.
Tubefilter: Is this your full-time thing now?
Darlene Schrijver: It is. It is my full-time thing.
Tubefilter: What was the point where you committed to going full-time?
Darlene Schrijver: I’m not supposed to talk about it. [laughs] I was working for the airlines part-time in customer service. It was right when that time when they were canceling a lot of flights and I was in customer service and everybody was mad at the customer service people and I had no control over anything. Well, it was twofold. I got a big two month contract from TikTok that paid handsomely, and I just figured, the hours at the airport were funky. It was that and I got a big project coming up that’s finally coming out next year coming that I had to get started on.
Tubefilter: Yes. I can imagine that that was not exactly the most fun career to have at that particular time.
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. It made me really grateful for the platform. Everybody has been, for the most part, if you don’t focus on the trolls, everybody’s so nice and supportive and it’s a great community of people.
Tubefilter: Good. Now for the upcoming news–you have a wooden salad bowl coming out?
Darlene Schrijver: Yes.
Tubefilter: Tell me how that started and how it’s been going.
Darlene Schrijver: I’ve always had lots of requests for the bowls, where do I get them, and that kind of thing. I did an affiliate program with one company, but it just wasn’t panning out very well. I always wanted to have a Salad Lab salad bowl, and the people at Viral Nation agreed. They’ve been helping me and they’ve found a couple really great craftsmen. We have this bowl that’s just been launched and it’s so beautiful and I’m so excited about it. Hopefully everybody will have them for the holidays.
@thesaladlab How to Maintain Handcrafted Wooden Salad Bowls #salad #thesaladlab #woodbowls #woodbowlcare #handcrafted #recycledwood #doingdishes ♬ Beautiful Nature – Steven Solveig
Tubefilter: What’s the production process like? You’re working with specific artisans.
Darlene Schrijver: Yes. They’re out of Canada and Viral Nation set the whole thing up. It’s interesting because nowadays there’s no more woodworking classes in the high schools. That craft is really being lost. I really wanted to support local craftsmen. My dad was a craftsman, played with wood as a hobby and tried to build his own boat. Before we had the flower shop, my family had an arts-and-crafts gallery and we had wood craftsmen that kind of helped raise me.
It’s a dying craft that I would like to keep and help small businesses and craftspeople. I know it is pricey, but we’ve tried looking everywhere for a living wage and they’re beautiful. They’re handcrafted. That’s what I’ve been using the whole time. I have to stay true to the bowl.
Tubefilter: Yes, honestly, it’s worth the extra money to pay craftspeople fairly for their time and their skill to make products like these. You might not be able to talk about this yet, but are you planning to create any other products?
Darlene Schrijver: Actually, yeah, I’ve already got beakers coming in, glass beakers with little Salad Lab logos and they’re metric and English measurements, cups and metric. A lot of things are going metric these days. I think eventually we’re gonna be metric, but anyway, you can have your own Salad Lab beakers. And eventually I would like to have a whole package of test tubes, beakers, petri dishes, wooden bowls, tossers, and maybe a recipe book. I’ve been riding the roller coaster, but maybe someday I’ll have my own salad show, cooking show, who knows. I have done some cooking demos, and those are fun. Just everybody make more salads.
Tubefilter: Yes, that’s the end goal. Everyone: more salads. Okay, to wrap up, if you could tell people one thing about your journey as a creator, what would you tell them?
Darlene Schrijver: Just to ignore the trolls and have fun with it. Life is short. Do what you love and everything else will fall into place eventually.
