A kitchen gadget is an awkward place to put a school. It needs a home on the counter, beside the kettle, the toaster and the thing bought in January with excellent intentions. In 2005, Joe Girard and Dawn Thomas were trying to persuade investors to make room for another device. They called it Ruby. It had a touchscreen and a purpose: help people learn to cook. The investors were unconvinced. The lessons, however, had somewhere else to go.
That is the useful opening to Girard’s story. A trained cook became a culinary entrepreneur, and a proposed object became an online classroom. Years later, Rouxbe would report more than a million students across 180 countries. But start with the countertop. There is something pleasingly domestic about a business decision that removes an appliance.
Dinner first. Cameras later.
Girard came to the project with experience inside professional kitchens, including work as a Chef de Partie at Fairmont Hotels. He and Thomas had also operated a film-catering company, Freaky Beats & Eats. The name suggests a party; Thomas’s recollections suggest considerably more washing up. Catering meant relentless work and moving the operation through rain, snow and heat. The glamour generally arrived at the wrap party.
It was a demanding apprenticeship for their next enterprise. A film crew needs to eat wherever the production happens to be. A caterer has to make the food arrive despite the location. Thomas was emphatic about the experience: she would never do it again, but she was glad it had led them to Rouxbe. Their business partnership carried practical kitchen work into teaching.
The film connections traveled with them. To make cooking videos, Girard and Thomas rented a house and converted it into a production studio. Members of an X-Men rigging crew helped outfit the kitchen set, persuaded with food. An Emmy-winning producer helped with lighting and cameras. Feeding people had produced a rather useful address book. Hollywood’s contribution to the school included knowing where to put the lights.
Thomas became the voice and a central production force behind the lessons. Girard brought his cooking background to the business of getting the school built and distributed. Their division of work matters. The person selling access to a lesson and the person making its instructions clear are solving different problems. A cooking school needs both problems solved before anyone can sensibly attempt dinner.
The school escapes the box
Ruby bundled teaching with a piece of hardware. When that proposal failed to win investors over, the founders removed the hardware component and concentrated on premium online content. The revised spelling came from the kitchen: roux, the mixture used to thicken a sauce, combined with be, to exist. Rouxbe retained the sound of the original name while giving it a culinary explanation.
There is an appealing economy to the change. Girard and Thomas already had knowledge worth teaching. Once the device was set aside, they could concentrate on making that instruction available through the web. The school’s name still carried a small cooking technique inside it. Even its branding came with a lesson.
Lessons + a device
The lessons travel
By May 2006, design agency Burnkit was helping establish Rouxbe’s web presence and supplying a Flash player for its instructional videos. Flash now has the archaeological charm of an old restaurant menu. At the time, it was part of the work of making the lessons watchable. Girard praised the agency’s vision. The digital school required its own collaborators, just as the production kitchen had.
The school’s central teaching idea was technique. A recipe provides a destination; skills help a cook find the next one. Thomas explained the approach through braising: learn how to braise, and you gain the freedom to apply that understanding beyond a particular dish. It is a modest promise with substantial consequences for someone who has been following instructions without knowing why they work.
An empire of small kitchen questions
Early traces of Girard online are wonderfully ordinary. In November 2008, he left a comment on Matt Mullenweg’s post about making tzatziki. “You are right about the Greek yogurt. That’s the key.” He thanked another commenter for mentioning Rouxbe and offered a link to its school. A founder discussing his business in public could also have an opinion about the yogurt.
This is a more intimate picture of distribution than a chart of sign-ups. Someone makes food, someone else watches, and a cook joins the conversation with a useful observation. Girard identified himself as CEO and co-founder. The title arrived after the yogurt advice, where it could do less damage to the mood.
In August 2009, he appeared in the comments of the food blog Delicieux with an update. Rouxbe was offering a free daily cooking-school lesson without requiring sign-up. Step-by-step video recipes were free, too; the school membership remained paid, with a monthly option. He thanked the blogger for the original post. Here was a founder personally explaining what had changed to people who might actually use it.
A few months later, The Messy Baker wanted to share Rouxbe’s scrambled-egg video. Readers had raised kitchen difficulties, and creamy eggs were among them. Girard permitted the blogger to publish a lesson ordinarily available through paid membership. He also invited her to join the affiliate program. The exchange had the scale of breakfast, with the commercial sense to let breakfast introduce the school.
The episode deserves its place beside the larger contracts. Scrambled eggs are an excellent reminder that familiar food can still defeat a person. Girard’s response put a usable lesson within reach of an existing audience. It also gave the blogger a reason to continue the relationship. The business had found a doorway through a very small pan.
The homework was edible
Girard had a particularly concrete way to explain what professional cooks might want from online instruction. In Rouxbe’s Marriott training material, he recalled wishing he had the resources of a cooking school in his back pocket while working in the kitchen. The phrase makes room for the realities of a working day. Instruction can be nearby without requiring the cook to leave the job.
“Your chef knife is the single most important cooking tool you have.”
Joe Girard, on Swich
The Marriott application tour lists two foundational training levels, 26 learning units and 84 instructional lessons. Alongside videos are quizzes, flashcards, cooking assessments and questions for experts. Girard introduces the service in a tour video. It is a picture of online teaching with several ways to check whether watching has turned into understanding.
Watch → practice → receive feedback. The screen carries the instruction; the cook does the work.
At the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Rouxbe training included about 50 hours of coursework alongside cooks’ jobs. There were online lessons and assessments, then practical exercises in the hotel kitchens: knife skills, a French omelet, pasta, risotto and hollandaise among them. A chef graded the results with formal criteria and iPad tools. An omelet remained an omelet, even when its report card lived on a tablet.
The arrangement gave the digital lesson a physical consequence. A cook had to demonstrate the skill where the food was actually made. That is a useful detail in Girard’s career because his product was easy to describe as video. The training around the video made it a school. Watching someone handle a pan was the beginning of the assignment.
Chartwells offered another setting. Following a 2014 pilot, its 2015 partnership with Rouxbe brought training to associates in food operations at more than 260 American colleges and universities. Learners could revisit material and take assessments. Girard, then CEO and co-founder, described the purpose as giving associates tools to learn and grow on the job. The old caterer’s concern with feeding groups had acquired an educational counterpart.
Cooking at cruising altitude
Some distribution choices were less predictable. In November 2014, Rouxbe joined JetBlue’s Fly-Fi Hub, alongside providers including Coursera, FOX and National Geographic. Passengers could watch educational cooking videos on their own devices. A subsidized Rouxbe membership offered a way to continue the lessons after landing. It is a curious place to meet a culinary school, somewhere above the possibility of chopping an onion.
Girard’s pitch was playful: travelers could take off and arrive as better cooks. The actual practice would have to wait. Still, the partnership found people in a stretch of time when they might welcome something to learn. His classroom had become portable enough to accompany someone between cities, with the kitchen waiting at the other end.
A different kind of classroom on Pender Island
Plant-based cooking became another strand of Girard’s work. Rouxbe partnered with Forks Over Knives in 2015 on an online course covering preparation, herbs, spices, soups, entrées and desserts. Students would work at their own pace, undertake practical assignments and complete quizzes. The familiar structure carried into a different set of ingredients.
Girard and Thomas later co-founded Swich, offering free plant-forward cooking education. They also sold their Vancouver condo and moved to an undeveloped farm on Pender Island, off the British Columbia coast. A founder video series followed the work of setting up the farm, preparing meals and learning new skills. The teachers were making space for another round of being beginners.
The series opened with a stated ambition to teach 100 million people around the world to cook for free. That remains a goal, rather than an enrollment figure. Paired with a farm being built from scratch, it gives the story an unusual sense of scale: a large intended audience and a very particular place where the next task needs doing.
Rouxbe’s current leadership page names Gary Apito as CEO and places Girard among its founders. The school has a life beyond his tenure in the chief executive’s chair. His route through it remains distinctive: professional cooking, film catering, a device that fell away, and lessons that kept moving. The online audience could become enormous. At the receiving end, there would still be one cook, one kitchen and something to make for dinner.