Celebrity Chef Sophia Roe is Pregnant

Celebrity chef Sophia Roe has a different kind of bun in the oven!

The James Beard Award–winning chef announced that she’s expecting her first child with now-fiancé Chris on March 23. “Introducing my best recipe yet, coming Summer 2025,” she captioned an Instagram carousel featuring intimate, bare bump maternity photos taken in her beloved kitchen. In her Instagram Story, Roe also shared Chris’ heartfelt reaction: “Baby I love you forever and I am so proud of you. You inspire me and so many. Thank you for making this baby for us. You are going to be the best mama,” he wrote.

In addition to the sweet Instagram post, Roe partnered with women’s health brand Perelel to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times. “For a life-changing recipe, ingredients matter,” the ad read, highlighting Roe’s go-to pre-conception and trimester-specific prenatal vitamins.

While Roe says choosing Perelel was an easy decision, navigating pregnancy at 35—often labeled a “geriatric pregnancy”—and doing so as a Black woman has been anything but simple. “The campaign is sexy just because I love the product, but also as a Black pregnant woman, the challenge has been for me to find care – and as someone who has resources, right?" Roe told People.

“I have a lot of resources, I have access to a lot of information and I didn’t find a doctor that could see me and was consistent and I felt like we aligned, or a midwife, until my second trimester, which sounds crazy,” she shared. “Some women are going to the doctor when they find out they’re six weeks pregnant. That was not my situation. I was 14 and 15 weeks pregnant before I was really getting consistent care and I can’t even say that all of it was good.”

Despite knowing the statistics, Roe said she was still taken aback by her actual experience. “It’s so wild too, as someone who works so deeply in food efficacy, you hear about these statistics, right? You hear that you’re four times more likely to die as a pregnant woman when you’re Black. You hear about the challenges of what it is to get care and be taken seriously and self-advocacy, but it’s a whole other ballgame to exist in it. And it shouldn’t be surprising.”

The contrast between her experience and those of her white friends made the disparities even more stark, Roe said. “It’s upsetting that a lot of the community that I have built with my Black friends who had children is over how hard it was for us and how much we don’t feel like people were listening to us,” said Roe. “Or just in general, the amount of times I’d reach out to a midwife and meet someone or have conversations and it feel like, ‘Well, I don’t really have time for you,’ or ‘Yeah well, you should do this first,’ or ‘You should go see this first,’ or feeling pressured into a birth maybe that I don’t really want to do.”

Despite the challenges she faced finding the care she needed and deserved, Roe is excited to embrace motherhood alongside her newest adventure partner—in the heart of New York City. “I don’t work for this baby, this baby works for me,” she joked, adding that she’s “really excited to be a mobile mom, a very around-the-city mom.”

“I plan on still doing my life. I still have a career. I still have all these things I want to do. And I imagine that being really inspiring for a [kid] to see [their] mom do all of these things right now,” Roe says. “I’m just hyped to still live my life, just with a baby.”