Drew Dixon
When the coronavirus lockdown hit Northeast Florida, it hit Jennifer Earnest hard. Earnest pivoted quickly to keep her catering business afloat and she now has a new revenue stream.
Earnest and her husband Jamey Evoniuk own Chef’s Garden Catering & Events based in Jacksonville and they are contracted to manage the café’ at the Cummer Museum arts and cultural center. The couple have a reputation for providing high-end service for prestigious events.
COVID-19 instantly wrecked all of their business as catering events for social parties and office events were canceled.
Stuck with no work in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, Earnest saw several friends on social media joking about “virtual happy hours” online. That was a springboard to online cooking classes.
“It’s a virtual cooking class and we deliver the ingredients,” Earnest said. “We had no meal delivery and we had no virtual cooking classes prior to this.”
The cooking classes have taken off. They started with smaller classes where about a dozen friends would sign up and pay $65 to $85 each for the food and ingredients to arrive at their door. Then they’d join a video conference online and class was in session.
“It happened within a week’s time period,” Earnest said. “We figured out a way to virtually connect with people” over food and the demand has increased week by week.
Earnest said she’s held about 30 class sessions with 12 to 20 participants each.
She also offers “visitor” viewers who don’t get the ingredients but can observe the cooking class for $20. Her most distant “visitor” was from Chile. Earnest has an upcoming group of 60 people from a law firm scheduled.
Still, the cooking classes don’t come close to the revenue she generated from regular catering. Earnest said it’s not clear when she’ll be able to return to regular catering but the virtual cooking class will remain a permanent element of her revenue.
“We’re looking at expanding,” Earnest said.“We’re working on how we take these new revenue streams and get them into divisions in our business. We’re trying to create a greater sense of community. These virtual classes allow our company not just to be in Jacksonville.”
Earnest’s next step is to figure out how to ship the cooking class kits nationwide.
