About WanderSavvy
About WanderSavvy
Honest product guides from people who actually use this stuff.
Meet Carol Whitfield, Lead Reviewer
Home cook. Honest reviewer. The woman who will tell you not to buy that pan.
I’ve been cooking seriously for over forty years. Not professionally, not in a restaurant kitchen, but in the real kind of kitchen where the smoke alarm goes off on Thanksgiving and someone always spills something before the guests arrive. The kind of kitchen where food actually matters.
I grew up in Findlay, Ohio, the third of five kids. My mother, Ruth, was not a fancy cook. She was a practical one. She could stretch a whole chicken into three meals and had a cast iron skillet that lived permanently on the back left burner. I learned to cook the way I learned most things growing up: by standing close enough to watch and occasionally getting in the way.
By the time I was twelve, I was making Sunday biscuits on my own. By sixteen, I was running Thanksgiving sides. I never thought of it as a talent. It was just what you did.
How I Ended Up in Nashville (and Why I Never Left)
I met my husband Dale at a state fair in 1988. He was from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and he ate three of my entries at the baked goods competition before I even noticed him standing there. I say that’s how I knew I’d marry him. He says he was just hungry. Thirty-five years later, he is still the first person I hand a spoon to.
We moved to Nashville after we married in 1990, and this city has been home ever since. We raised three kids here: Megan, Josh, and Lily. Megan lives in Charlotte now with her husband and my two grandchildren. She calls me before every dinner party in a mild panic, and I always answer. Josh lives about twenty minutes away and comes over most Sunday afternoons. He’s the one who inherited the cooking instinct, and he is also brutally honest when something doesn’t work, which I appreciate more than I let on. Lily is down in Austin, working in marketing, and she is the one who looked at my notes a few years ago and said, “Mom, you need to put this on the internet.” She was right, though I’d never have figured out how to do it without her.
The Catering Years
For about a decade, starting in 2003, I ran a small catering operation out of my home. Nothing with a logo or a proper business plan. Just word of mouth, a packed calendar from September through December every year, and a lot of rehearsal dinners, baby showers, and church fundraisers.
Those years taught me more about kitchen equipment than everything that came before them combined. Cooking for eight people is forgiving. Cooking for sixty is a completely different problem. I burned through two cheap stockpots in a single season before I finally invested in a serious Dutch oven. That pot changed how I thought about buying kitchen equipment forever. It was the first time I truly understood the difference between price and cost.
I also learned, the hard way, that a lot of what gets marketed as “professional-grade” is not. I’ve had spatulas snap in half, nonstick coatings blister off, and knife handles crack after one season of real use. I started keeping notes. Not for any particular reason, just because it felt like information worth having.
Why I Started WanderSavvy
In 2019, I stepped back from catering to help care for my mother after she moved in with us. Ruth passed in late 2020, and that period was hard and quiet in equal measure. I cooked my way through it, the way I always have. I reorganized my kitchen, tested and retested recipes, and filled two notebooks with honest assessments of every piece of equipment I owned or had recently replaced.
When Lily visited that Christmas, she read through those notebooks and told me they were the most useful kitchen product reviews she’d ever come across. No marketing language. No “game-changer” this or “revolutionary” that. Just clear, practical opinion from someone who had actually cooked on, worn out, and replaced this stuff dozens of times.
WanderSavvy launched in early 2022. I wrote the first articles myself, the same way I approach a new recipe: carefully, with a lot of tasting along the way.
Carol covers our Home and Garden, Kitchen and Cookware, and Food-related content. Her reviews draw on decades of daily cooking, gardening in the Nashville heat, and the kind of product knowledge you only get from wearing things out and replacing them.
Read all of Carol’s articles →
Lily Whitfield, Beauty and Skincare
Lily is Carol’s youngest daughter, based in Austin, Texas. She handles all of WanderSavvy’s beauty and skincare content. After years of building her own skincare routine through trial and plenty of error, she started writing the kind of honest, no-nonsense product reviews she wished she’d had when she was starting out.
Lily focuses on products that work for real skin, not perfect-lighting Instagram skin. She tests everything she reviews for at least two weeks before writing about it.
Emile Roose, Founder and Editor
WanderSavvy was created by Emile Roose, a web developer and researcher based in Kortrijk, Belgium. Emile handles the technical side of the site, the editorial planning, and the interactive tools you’ll find embedded in many of our guides, including the Garden Bed Size Calculator and the Companion Planting Lookup Tool.
Emile has a background in biomedical sciences and bioinformatics, which might seem unrelated to product reviews until you realize that both fields are built on one thing: reading data carefully and not overstating what it tells you. That same discipline shapes how WanderSavvy approaches product research.
You can find Emile on his personal site or reach him directly at [email protected].
What We Stand For
We only recommend products we’d buy ourselves. Amazon pays us the same commission rate regardless of which product you choose. Our only incentive is to point you toward something that actually works.
We tell you when something isn’t worth it. Not every product review ends with a recommendation. If we tested it and it fell short, we say so.
We show our work. Our evaluation process is public and detailed. We explain exactly how we assess products and what criteria matter most in each category.
We update our content. Product lines change, prices shift, and better options come along. We revisit our guides regularly and mark every article with the date it was last reviewed.
Contact Us
Have a question, correction, or product suggestion? We read everything.
General inquiries: [email protected]
Location: Kortrijk, Belgium
WanderSavvy is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Our editorial content is independent of our affiliate relationships.