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'Nailed It!'s Supervising Culinary Producer Reveals What It's Really Like To Work On Netflix's Biggest Food Show

Photo credit: Netflix / Magical Elves
Photo credit: Netflix / Magical Elves

Kim Seeley is the Supervising Culinary Producer of Nailed It! for Magical Elves where she brainstorms the food challenges you see on every episode, stocks the studio's pantry with all the necessary ingredients (plus some extras to stump contestants!), and puts together specialty cake mixes because the set doesn't use the boxed stuff. Kim spoke with Delish about her love for cooking and Nailed It! season six, which is now available for streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned for the October 5 release of the Nailed It! Baking Challenges For The Rest Of Us Cookbook.


I wanted to be a chef ever since I was 10. My great-grandfather was a pastry chef who trained in France and my grandmother—his daughter—was an amazing baker and cook. I lived with my grandparents part-time every year, all summer and holidays. So my grandmother and I just cooked and baked my whole childhood together. I knew when I was in the end of elementary school in Glendale, California, this is what I wanted to do, which back then was not something that people really wanted to do.

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[At Woodrow Wilson Jr. High], I took a lot of food classes and in high school I took every food class I could get my hands on. And the main food teacher at my high school [Glendale High School] actually had a side business. She picked me out when I was 15 in high school, taking my first food class with her and said, "I think you have a lot of promise, do you want to come work for me?"

I started washing dishes and then worked my way up to actually being able to serve and then cook. By the time I was graduating from high school, I worked for a handful of different caterers. I was doing small parties almost on my own then I went right into culinary school and into college and I catered the whole time. I got my first job out of college working at an AIDS hospice [called the Caelum Care Center] running the kitchen. I kept going and taking jobs that were interesting and different. I was working at a restaurant as the executive pastry chef when the executive chef got the job as the first on-air sous chef for Hell's Kitchen. That's how I got into television.

That was almost 20 years ago. Since then, I've just kept coming back to production; the first 10 years, I still would go back and forth between restaurants or catering and being a private chef. It's been about 15 years now that I've been pretty much doing production non-stop. I didn't know what producers did [at first] so I just kind of walked onto set and was like, "I like being here and it involves food, so...great!"

[As for my time at Nailed It!], it is one of the most fun shows to work on because we all are just having fun alongside with the contestants and trying to keep it light and funny. At the end of the day, this is a comedy show about baking. Everyone that's there is looking to have fun and laugh and be silly and have a good time. The fun comes from everyone from the PAs to the director, to the producers, to the contestants, to the guest judges, to Jacques and Nicole; everyone just wants to come to work and have fun.

The most important thing is that we look at how everything's changing as we go into every season. When we [wrap], we leave the season behind and when we start the next one, we're really looking at what's trending in the world and food and television and what's trending in comedy so that we're speaking to the most relevant time.

[After five seasons], we start with bigger concepts and ideas. We look at stuff that people are doing online on TikTok, on Pinterest, on all the different places that people go for inspiration. And when we see [something] really popular, we start talking about things we haven't done before because we're always trying to do stuff that we haven't repeated a bunch of times. Anything that's not cake often throws contestants for a loop because I think they all come onto the show with the mindset of like, "I'm going to make a cake" and forget the challenges can be anything in the world.

[In the beginning, the show] was really all about Pinterest and the fails that came with that, which everyone gleefully posted and thought were so funny because, even as a professional pastry chef, I will look at Pinterest and I will see amazing bakes. But there's no instructions, and if there are instructions, they're not great. How did you get from A to B without any of the information that you're trying not to supply!? The fails that come from that are so natural, because without information, how are you supposed to know what you're doing? It just became such a thing to see people posting these fails and it naturally turned into Nailed It!

I remember when we had the kids come on with their parents and they made rocket ship cakes. That was crazy because normally our cakes are a foot to two-feet-tall and they're regularly stacked. They're pretty straightforward and we get crazy fails from that and with this particular challenge, the cakes were so tall and gravity was definitely a huge factor. I found myself plastic wrapping cakes together.

When it comes to stocking the pantries on set, we buy things like flour and sugar and butter, sprinkles, fondant, modeling chocolate; those are huge commodities on our show. But we also spend a lot of money on candy and fun things like Flamin' Hot Cheetos and beef jerky. I look at the projects that we're doing and I look for items that looks similar to the items on our cakes, trying to find something that will be helpful for our contestant, who is down to two minutes and needs to get eyeballs or fingers or flowers or something on their cake that looks like what it should be.

This season, we do some projects that we've never done before. I know they've kind of teased them—we do a pie, we do a candy apple, we do some more non-traditional forms of baking, which are really a lot of fun. And one of the things that I loved is we finally got Jacques on a cake.

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