Emmymade (Emmy Cho)

There is a specific kind of joy that only Emmymade can deliver: the sight of a grown woman, camera-ready and grinning, staring down a can of surströmming or a bag of dried crickets and declaring, “Let’s give it a try!” That catchphrase — and the gentle fearlessness behind it — has made Emmeline Mayline Cho, better known as Emmymade, one of the most beloved food creators on the internet, with around 3 million YouTube subscribers and more than 630 million total views. She is not a celebrity chef. She is something rarer: the friend who will eat anything, so you don’t have to.

Cho was born in California and grew up in Rhode Island, where she earned a degree in graphic design — a background that still shows in the clean, warm, meticulously lit presentation of her videos. Her adult life took an unexpected turn when she and her husband moved to Japan to work as English teachers. She knew no Japanese and knew almost no one; the loneliness of that first year in a foreign country is the honest, unglamorous origin story of one of YouTube’s most joyful channels.

With no friends nearby and time on her hands, she picked up a video camera. She did not start with food: her first upload was a DIY instructional video called “How to Make a Moss Pot,” and the channel name she chose — emmymadeinjapan — was a product of that era, a new mom making things in a new country. But there was one skill she could practice entirely on her own: eating. She started visiting her local Japanese grocers, buying whatever caught her eye, and filming her reactions — early series like “Whatcha Eating?” and taste-tests of Japanese candy such as Neruneruneru became the template for everything that followed.

The formula turned out to be revolutionary in its simplicity. Viewers from around the world began mailing her their favorite snacks, and Emmymade tasted them on camera with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the delight of a kid at a birthday party. Dried crickets? Canned cheeseburger? Century eggs? Balut? She tried them all, and her high tolerance for foods most people would flinch at became part of the legend. Where other food creators perform disgust for comedy, Emmy performs openness for connection — and viewers from Seoul to São Paulo started seeing their own snack aisles reflected back at them.

What separates her from the pack is tone. There is no snark, no performative cruelty, no punching down at another culture’s pantry. Her approach — “let’s eat!” — is radical hospitality: every food deserves a fair tasting, every sender deserves gratitude, every culture’s candy aisle is worthy of attention. In an era when so much food content is built on hot takes and insult comedy, Emmymade’s channel feels like a standing invitation to a dinner party where nothing on the table is weird if someone loves it.

The industry noticed. Her warmth and credibility landed her partnerships with major brands including Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, and HelloFresh — collaborations that make sense because audiences genuinely trust her taste buds. Along the way she helped drive a measurable shift in Western snack culture: the surge in popularity of Asian snacks and candies on American store shelves happened, in no small part, because millions of viewers first encountered them in her hands. Few creators can claim they moved a supply chain.

After years in Japan, Cho moved back to the United States — Rhode Island, where she grew up — and the channel shed its “in Japan” suffix to become simply emmymade. The format didn’t need Japan; it needed Emmy. She is married with two sons, and while she keeps her family’s details largely private, the warmth that made her early Japan videos feel like letters to friends carried over seamlessly into her American studio. The channel’s second decade has been less about geography and more about depth: better cooking segments, more ambitious recipes, the same catchphrase.

She remains one of the platform’s great comfort watches. Put on an Emmymade video and you get something the algorithm rarely serves: a calm, kind, genuinely curious person having an uncomplicated good time. The subscribers keep coming — past 3 million and counting — because the premise never gets old. There is always another snack, another country, another box from a viewer, and another moment where Emmy Cho looks into the camera, smiles, and says: “Let’s give it a try!”

Beyond the taste-tests, she has quietly built one of the most internationally literate communities on YouTube. Her comment sections read like a United Nations of snacking — viewers correcting her pronunciation, sending regional variations of the same candy, explaining the childhood memories attached to a particular biscuit. That two-way exchange is the real engine of the channel: it was never a show about Emmy eating, it was a show about the audience feeding each other. More than a decade and a half in, the premise still works because the premise was never the food — it was the friendliness.