When Erica Tuggle had her second child, the idea of a homemade, family meal seemed further and further away. So, she took matters into her own hands.
Tuggle started Cookonnect, a service that connects families with in-home chefs, as a way to help provide busy families with home cooked meals while taking all the work off of their plate.
On Cookonnect’s website, families can choose a personalized menu and then connect with a chef who will take care of everything from shopping to cleaning. Tuggle said the goal of Cookonnect is threefold.
“We’re trying to create healthier families, because we do believe that homemade food, fresh food, and fresh ingredients is the best way to get there,” she said. “We also are trying to create more connected communities, so really building up that local community between chefs and families is important to us. And the last piece is economic opportunity, so giving our chefs another way to monetize their skill.”
Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Tuggle about her journey to starting Cookonnect. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To start, I would love to hear a bit about you. I know you’ve lived in Atlanta for about 10 years, but are you originally from the area?
Erica Tuggle: I’m not. I grew up in Connecticut. Actually I was born in Tennessee and then at three my family moved up to Connecticut. We were there for really my whole adolescent years. Then I left there [and] went to New York, where I went to NYU. I stayed there for a few years to work – I was at American Express at the time. And then after a few years of that, I decided I wanted to get my MBA. I ended up going to Boston – I went to Harvard Business School, and so I spent a couple of years there, and then I went to Minneapolis. So I’d been a lot of places before I came to Atlanta.
In Minneapolis, I worked at General Mills. So I was in the freezing cold, but with an awesome company, and had the opportunity to work on a lot of different food products there and start my food career, which was fascinating and really fun. But I was ready to leave the dead of winter and Minnesota. I actually got a call from Coca-Cola, and that’s what ended up bringing me down to Atlanta with my then-fiancé, now husband. That’s when we started our life here and that was 10 years ago, actually this year.
You said you started working in the food space at General Mills. Was that something that always interested you, or was that a surprising turn?
Tuggle: No, it was always of interest to me. I talk a lot about my mom and my grandmother, because they are both from-scratch cooks, and they are the ones that really inspired me to love food, and to connect food to my relationships and my nutrition, and all of those things. So I basically followed in their footsteps in trying to think about what I would want for my family. And being a foodie, as I call myself, I’m really interested in food in general. Before I even started working at General Mills, I interned there, because I was really excited about [them]. They have a huge focus on just family mealtime through convenience, as you can tell from their product set. It was really just a fun time for me to get into that space.
I started working with [Romano’s] Macaroni Grill restaurant, actually – that was my first job there. We were helping them take their entrée products, their menu items, and put them into frozen entrées in the grocery store. So I started getting more and more exposed to the restaurant space. By the time I made it to Coke, when I was finishing up my time there, the main focus for my team was building and rebuilding the “Coca-Cola and Food” strategy that we had. And that, as you can imagine, for Coca-Cola is massive, because it’s always Coca-Cola and a burger, Coca-Cola and popcorn – it’s Coca-Cola and food, that’s how you enjoy the beverage. We were working across grocery stores and food service providers, we were working with celebrity chefs. We were really understanding the ecosystem of food, but even more importantly the customer and the consumer and food, and how people think about it, the challenges that people have in eating well, and all of those things. I was uncovering a lot of insights as I was working throughout my career that all had kind of come together and could connect.
Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for Cookonnect? You just mentioned learning in your career about the challenges that can come with cooking, particularly with family mealtime. I have two small nephews, so I know how difficult that can be for their parents. When did the idea of doing something to help combat that arise for you?
Tuggle: It really hit home for me when I was at Coke. I had my first child, and that was a little bit more manageable. He wasn’t eating much more than whatever purée stuff we would make for him. We would homemake everything, right? Then I had my second child, and that was when I was leading this team on the Coke brand, and we were working on the food strategy and many other things. I was traveling a lot, and my job was bigger, and I had now these two little kids.
So as I continued in that job it just got harder, and I wasn’t able to do the things I wanted to do that my mom did, and that her mom did … which was provide homemade meals that I felt great about.
Instead, we were doing things that we like to do sometimes, but not all the time, like eating out and ordering in, and getting pre-made meals. Those things work in a pinch, but it was becoming a frequent occasion for us and not my vision for how we would be eating in our family.
So that was the inspiration, and [also] other moms. I love moms, because I feel like we get together and we just try to figure it out, you know? I talked to other moms and they were like, I found someone who’s cooking for me. She might be my neighbor in my neighborhood, or a college student, one of my friend’s students or children. And I was like, oh my goodness, really? And they’re like, yeah – I give them a credit card, they go to the grocery store, they come back, they take care of it. It’s all done. I loved that model, and I was excited about one, the fact that it could be more accessible for more people, and then also that you could really get a homemade meal while letting someone else who loves to cook and who has the time to do it help you with that part of your life.
It’s interesting you say it can be more accessible to more people. I’m probably not alone in thinking of a personal chef as something that only somebody who is really wealthy can afford. Can you talk about trying to position Cookonnect as a service that’s more accessible for more families?
Tuggle: That’s always been at the core of it, because I am very financially responsible – I guess fiscally responsible, as people say. But that’s always been at the core of it for me and my family, because if we were going to use a service like this – which we do use Cookonnect – we would want it to fit within our budget. There are a couple of things that we do to help make it work for more people. One, I explain it like a fractional chef. So they’re your personal chef, but also working for many other families on our platform. So you’re able to enjoy the benefits of that as well, because it means you don’t have to sign them up for a salary under your home. You can bring them on as you need them.
We also use technology. Our booking system really manages everything from our website. From the customizations that customers need, their profiles, their allergies, whatever it is, their dietary requirements – sharing of that information is really seamless. Booking the meals is really seamless, it takes a matter of minutes. And for our chefs, it makes it really easy for them because they get an order – they get meal items, and they get recipes, and they’re able to go and execute really flawlessly with that support. So the technology and centralizing a lot of the work that you might pay a personal chef to do, like menu development, we do that through our system. That’s how that comes to life and saves costs for the customer.
You know, a lot of people think – oh my gosh, this includes ingredients? It seems really cheap. We often purchase and buy a lot of waste as consumers, right? You throw things out of the refrigerator or the pantry all the time. Our chefs are … shopping really for you. That helps control some of the costs as well.
Lastly, our chefs – we recruit chefs that are working in professional kitchens restaurants around Atlanta, and they’re just not making a lot. So we’re able to, with our families, pay them more and still make it really reasonable for our families.
Do you have any data on how often people use the service? Are there more repeat customers, or people using it every once in a while? What’s the usual profile?
Tuggle: We do have good repeat customers who are using at least once a month, which is great. We launched subscriptions this year. A subscription is basically once a month, but we also have customers who are using us up to three times, four times a month, which is awesome.
Our product really focuses on two things. There’s a smaller version, which is two meals per person, and then there is a little bit more help, which is four meals per person. That’s usually near a week of meals for a family, because they usually go out on that fifth day, or whatever it might be. So that product is the most popular as well. People are buying, typically, the four meals per week, which means that they’re getting a meal for that night, and then everything else is stored for them so that they have the flexibility to enjoy those homemade meals when they need them.
You mentioned your chefs come from all over Atlanta. Can you talk a little bit about the recruiting process? When you were starting out, what were you looking for in a chef?
Tuggle: We focus on a few key areas: hospitality, the quality of their food, and then their cleanliness as well. There’s also this kind of magic item that we look for, which is ambition. As we have been learning and recruiting about the chef’s that come onto our platform and do really well, we found that all those things are really critical – one, to make sure the service is delivered at a standard that we appreciate and look for, but also to make sure that they look at Cookonnect as an opportunity for them to continue to grow and to reach whatever level they’re trying to get to. Many of them are building food businesses on the side, working on restaurant concepts of their own, and so Cookonnect helps them to accomplish those things as well.
Obviously, different houses have different kitchens and different set-ups – gas versus electric, etc. I assume that can be kind of a challenge for a chef coming in, and maybe a barrier to sign up for some customers as well. How do you approach that challenge?
Tuggle: It’s again through our booking system. Our customers have the opportunity to complete a profile, and we always encourage it because it helps us understand what’s in their kitchen,
what that experience will be like for the chef. We ask about exactly what you mentioned – gas versus electric, because the chefs always want to know that. We also ask about the type of equipment – so is there a blender, or a food processor. Then that information is available to the chef, and so they get a really good view of okay, here’s what I’m walking into, and now I feel really confident about how I can prepare this meal in this space.
It’s a great question – I usually get like, well what if I don’t have anything? We’ve had a full gambit of completely decked out kitchens to you’ve got some plates and knives – maybe some forks. It’s really interesting – the other thing we look for in our interviewing [of chefs] is the opportunity to think on your feet. We have a question around that, in terms of handling the unexpected because in any kitchen, whether it’s a residential kitchen or a restaurant kitchen, the unexpected will happen. So how you respond in those situations is really important. Recruiting that type of a chef helps us to find people and put them in situations where they’re going to figure it out, and they’re going to be creative and see it as actually an exciting opportunity.versus a doomsday scenario.
The only real experience I have with kitchens is watching “The Bear,” but I can imagine it’s fairly chaotic, and you would want someone who can adapt easily.
Tuggle: Right. And actually like, the home kitchen versus the restaurant kitchen? [The chefs] are like, oh this is amazing.
Do you usually just send one chef out per job?
Tuggle: Yeah.
So they have the room to themselves, which is probably kind of nice.
Tuggle: Exactly. So right now we do one chef per order and all the meals are prepared in one visit to the home. It makes it more convenient for the family too.
