Rohnert Park mom behind The Salad Lab has gone viral on TikTok for recreating celebrities’ favorite salads

Darlene Schrijver is kind of a big deal where the worlds of food and social media collide, but you’d never suspect it.

The Rohnert Park mother of two has developed a massive following on TikTok as The Salad Lab, racking up 2.6 million followers since she started making videos in the early days of the pandemic.

As a 50-something empty-nester, she doesn’t fit the typical profile of a TikTok influencer, the social media platform that seems dominated by Gen Z. But in the spring of 2020, when almost everyone else was sharing dance videos and baking projects on the video-sharing app, Schrijver carved out her own niche.

“There were tons of bread videos,” Schrijver said. “Everyone was making sourdough bread. I did not need to be making a loaf of sourdough bread every day. I thought, ‘Where’s the salads?’”

Besides offering something different, part of the appeal of her videos, which are shot overhead with her iPhone in her kitchen, is that they’re short, simple and delivered with a perky energy that’s not overdone.

The roots of The Salad Lab predate COVID-19 boredom, though.

The Tubbs Fire is part of the story, too, and so is her daughter, Athena, who was a champion weightlifter on a national and international scale while a student at Santa Rosa’s Maria Carrillo High School. Athena is now about to graduate from UC Santa Cruz.

Athena was away at college and asked her mom for the recipes she had made as part of her nutrition program while she was competing. That was a problem, though.

“I only kept them in a binder and a recipe box, and they were all gone from the fires,” said Schrijver, who lost her home off Mark West Springs Road during the 2017 firestorm.

“So I kept putting it off, and my girlfriend said, ‘Why don’t you throw them on TikTok? Your daughter’s on TikTok all the time anyway,’” Schrijver recalled.

Her earliest videos, posted while she was wearing pajamas, are no longer available. None of her videos ever showed her face ― just a giant salad bowl and her hands.

She started gaining some TikTok traction when she challenged herself to post 30 salads in 30 days. Her still-small-but-growing legion of followers kept requesting a “Kardashian” salad that the celebrity sisters frequently ordered from their local health-food restaurant on the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” TV show.

Schrijver decided to give it a whirl. It went viral.

“It’s a very simple salad; it’s a decent salad,” she said. “You put anything Kardashian in a title — or any kind of celebrity for the most part — and it goes viral. I didn’t know that at the time, but I learned very quickly.”

Schrijver, who said she just really likes salads, didn’t intend to become an influencer. She worked in financial services before deciding to become a stay-at-home mom.

After the fires, she took a job at the Santa Rosa airport with American Airlines, inspired by her mother’s career with United Airlines. She now cares for her mother, who she recently had to move into an Alzheimer’s-care facility.

Between working at the airport and keeping up with her daughter’s competition schedule, while also training for a triathlon herself, Schrijver’s life was pretty full.

All of this, though, was laying the groundwork for her newfound fame when The Salad Lab took off.

Schrijver said social media has its downsides, something she already knew from her daughter’s teen years.

Her Salad Lab Instagram account got hijacked, and she had to start from scratch with that. There also are copycat accounts on TikTok and, of course, the comments from what she said are a small percentage of people who “aren’t happy.”

“You really have to be thick-skinned. When you work for an airline in customer service and people are yelling and screaming at you, you get thick skin. When you have a mother with Alzheimer’s who calls you names to your face, you get really thick skin. And so, yeah, it still bothers me. I’m not gonna lie.”

But there are definite perks, too, to her social media following, she said.

After the Kardashian salad went viral, Schrijver continued to occasionally make celebrity-inspired salads, finding ideas from celebrities’ “What I eat in a day” videos, for instance.

Her most viral video is for a “Kylie Jenner” salad, with almost 13 million views to date.

The popularity of those videos was enough to get her invited last year to Hulu’s red carpet premiere of “The Kardashians.”

Another brush with celebrity came when she learned Elle Fanning had a secret TikTok account. When Schrivjer went to look it up, she was surprised to discover the Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated actress was following her.

“I direct message her and say, ‘I’d love to make your favorite salad,’ and she came right back and said, ‘Oh my gosh, a restaurant going out of business (and) I’d love it if you made this Cobb salad, but don’t put any tomatoes on it.’ That’s one of my most-viewed items.”

But her biggest fan-girl moment was when Jennifer Aniston reviewed Schrijver’s interpretation of the “Friends” salad in an Allure magazine video.

“That was probably my ‘Oh my God!’ moment,” Schrijver said.

The Salad Lab has become a full-time diversion.

Each video she produces takes about four hours to prep, film and edit, she said, and that doesn’t include time spent researching, shopping or replying to comments.

The 2.6 million followers, while nice, haven’t exactly translated into a fortune, but they do pay some bills. Schrijver said she makes a few hundred dollars each month from TikTok, Amazon and a partnership with a salad-bowl company.

She does occasionally entertain paid sponsorships, but her beverage-pairing suggestions at the end of each video, which frequently feature Sonoma County wines, aren’t paid. She just wants to support the local industry.

With the increased following, Schrijver is working on getting used to a more public persona.

She did a salad demonstration in February at Ileoni in Petaluma, and just having a Press Democrat photographer take photos caused a case of nerves. But she’s open to seeing where the success of The Salad Lab will take her.

Although Schrijver is guarded about sharing too much information, she admitted to having a big project in the works.

“That’s probably going to take me places,” she said. “I’m still kind of riding the wave of the journey. I’m not sure where it’s going. I had no idea I’d be doing this at this point in my life, but that’s OK.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.