Jenna Baker’s journey from the Culinary Institute of America to her Cook To Be Well kitchen inside The Glowing Body Yoga Studio is a long one, but each piece of the road has been its own growing experience. Initially she thought her life would be built around playing and teaching music - the oboe, specifically - but it ended up being a job at a “terrible restaurant in a hotel” that changed the course of her life.
“I went to a music conservatory to study music education, and I had a passion for it, but it wasn’t my calling,” she says. “About two years into school, I got a job as a waitress and hostess. All I could talk about was this crummy restaurant job, so a friend of mine said, ‘You’ll get your degree, but you’ll probably be a chef.’ I read cookbook bios to learn how people got to where they were. I called a 1-800 number to get information about culinary schools, and they sent me snail-mail information. I took it all to my parents. My dad said no education is a waste, so let’s go visit the schools.”
Jenna chose the Culinary School of America but knew nothing about the industry, which is just as well since the school required six months of full-time restaurant experience prior to starting classes. Jenna quickly jumped into the world of fine dining and quickly developed a passion for pastry.
By 23 years old, Jenna had completed an internship in San Francisco, graduated from culinary school, taken a full-time position at the well-known Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, gotten married, and was pregnant with her first child.
“That was an immediate halt to climbing the ladder in fine dining. It was a lot of hours, low pay, a lot of sexism and ego, but I kept a foot in the door while staying home with my kids. I preserved, grew a big garden, and raised my children. It wasn’t a lost part of my career. It didn’t help me climb the ladder and make connections, but it certainly wasn’t lost,” she says. “I did part-time work in restaurants, did some consulting, and drew up pastry menus for friends.”
A big turning point in Jenna’s career came when she put together a lunch program for a small private Catholic school, an avenue that fed her desire for school food reform. For six years, she watched students come to know, trust, and love her healthier cooking. The professional experience was worth its weight, but the toll it was taking on her health was not. Thus began her deep dive into what a therapeutic diet really meant.
“It was a pivotal moment. First, it was difficult - and I was a professional chef! - to know what to eat and cook when I wasn’t going to eat dairy or gluten or refined bread. A lot of times I’d turn to foods that were convenient, like a sandwich, but I wanted to eat whole and clean, with a bit of an elimination diet to heal my digestive system,” she says. “But second, it was so effective. All of these health issues that I’d normalized, that I didn’t want to recognize as health issues, went away. It was the best thing I ever did for my health.”
Jenna started Cook To Be Well in 2013 as a consulting and cooking workshop-based business that focused on demystifying the cooking process. She helped people identify their challenges and find manageable solutions to simplify and amplify their diets. She also took a yoga training course and started teaching yoga.
While developing Cook To Be Well, Jenna also served as a chef for First Descents, a nonprofit outdoor adventure therapy program for kids with cancer. Suddenly, creating menus that were plant-based and nutrient dense became her main focus.
“Between all of these intersecting things - being a parent, growing food, running a school lunch program, doing yoga training - I discovered that I was uniquely qualified to do this thing, to get this small group of people to trust me and prepare food that had familiar flavor profiles and textures. People felt good. They had energy. Their digestive systems were working. I did this for two years, and they decided to adopt and formalize my nutrition program. So, I got hired to run the program for three more years, working remotely,” she said. “Throughout that process, people would ask me why I wouldn’t open a restaurant or do a food service, but I didn’t see that I could sustain it.”
In the fall of 2015, Jenna decided to take another leap in a new direction: spend one year traveling in an RV with her kids. The experience served a dual purpose as she was ready to leave Virginia and find a new place to set down roots somewhere in the South. She and her kids settled in the Knoxville, and Jenna started brainstorming her next gig.
Cook To Be Well was kept alive by finding private clients, but she still had a dream for creating something more accessible to the general public. Jenna knew her passion for plant-based cooking could translate to a wider audience, but she wasn’t about to sink her savings into something that couldn’t swim. After a few trial-and-error attempts to market a meal service out of a rented kitchen, Jenna connected with the folks at Glowing Body.
“I told them I wanted to teach cooking workshops, and there used to be a raw food juice bar there, but the kitchen had been turned into a closet,” she says. “I had a mentorship meeting set up with the Tennessee Small Business Development Center the next day, so I took that idea to the appointment and we crunched the numbers. I only needed to feed 15 people a day to stay in business, so it was low risk. We started figuring it out, and a month later, I was open. That was the spring of 2018.”
Cook To Be Well was a grab-and-go from the start. Jenna bought produce and products locally, whatever was fresh and in season, and developed upwards of 30 different Buddha bowls that included a grain, two prepared vegetables, a leafy green, and a sauce. By the end of 2019, she was already pivoting to Be Well boxes, a take-home collection of meal prep items customers could prepare in their own kitchens, a strategy that proved helpful once COVID-19 hit in March and food service restrictions were well underway.
To her surprise and delight, meeting demand was the first problem Jenna encountered when she built her business inside the yoga studio.
“I didn’t know going in if Knoxville would want this food. Are there customers out there? There are. I’ve never done any marketing outside of Instagram and word of mouth. There is a need, and there is a market, but we’re at the point where we need to scale. I have the confidence to do that now,” says Jenna. “I haven’t had the right door open yet, but I’m doing the right things and learning what I don’t know. I want the company to reflect a lifestyle and a value, which is a big ask. I want to maintain my values and not compromise the quality of the product.
“I’ve come a long way,” she continues, “and I don’t want to give up.”
For more information on ordering Be Well boxes, visit CookToBeWell.com
