In the past few years, Portland-focused food influencers have turned their attention to Vancouver. Emily Snieska, who runs The Portland Foodies and PDX Supper Club accounts on Instagram, not only focuses on Vancouver, but lives here. The Portland Foodies, with 32,000 followers, recently won Best Local Instagram Account from Willamette Week’s Best of Portland reader survey.
Snieska majored in marketing with a minor in digital media at Utah Valley University. She began as a film major based on her lifelong love of making films but decided to change her degree to find an occupation with more family-friendly hours. She created a blog and Instagram account focused on travel (she’s visited 20 countries) for a social media marketing class in college.
After graduating, she moved to Texas and continued building her travel Instagram account. She shifted to posting about flight deals out of Austin airport and drew a slew of followers. This taught her the importance of finding something specific that people want to see. Simply posting nice photos or videos isn’t an effective social media strategy.
Snieska’s husband took a job with Horizon Air and the couple moved to east Vancouver in 2020. Snieska wasn’t happy about the move but set about trying to fall in love with the city of Portland. She began by delving into the thriving food scene and creating The Portland Foodies account on Instagram in 2021 to share her food finds. Her followers doubled when she left her day job at Aetna, focused her attention on her social media and began PDX Supper Club last spring.
“I truly think creating the Supper Club and creating a community space where people have made lifelong friends is why Portland Foodies is so successful. People hang out outside of the Supper Club. It’s great that you can connect with people you’d only meet online. It’s a safe place to make friends who love food. Connection and energy are contagious. Supper Club feels like a meetup but more personal,” Snieska said.
She’s leveraged her ability to attract followers to create a consulting business that helps businesses and influencers run successful social media campaigns. She has collaborated with Burgerville, Ellenos Yogurt, Killer Burger and Adrift.
“I don’t care about followers. I want to create a community space and help small businesses,” Snieska said.
Her PDX Supper Club does both. There’s no registration fee to join. Interested would-be members fill out a form linked through the Instagram site. Members have access to chat groups on the Geneva app.
They can also buy tickets to events. A recent PDX Supper Club event was a multicourse dinner at Cecilia’s for 24 people that happened in mid-July ($80 per person). A Hood River Wine Weekend is planned for late September ($550 per person).
Snieska picks half of the restaurants in Portland and half in Vancouver because she has members in both areas, but she loves to share great spots in Vancouver.
Typically all of the proceeds from Supper Club dinners go to the restaurant. Most of Snieska’s income comes from social media coaching and consulting, as well as paid collaborations. She likes to use Supper Club purely as a way to build community, support local businesses and help foodies find great places to eat.
“I get emails from people who say, ‘I’ve lived in Vancouver for many years. You’ve shown me places I didn’t know about,’ ” Snieska said.
