A CHAT WITH
RESILIENCE, ACCESS AND EQUITY
Joi Chevalier elevated her love of food and technology in order to help BIPOC entrepreneurs level up. BY CY WHITE
woman. A graduate of UT Austin, she got her start in tech right out of her Ph.D. program when the internet was on the cusp becoming the all-encompassing global power that it is today. “I spent the next 18 years as a technologist running new products, building new products, connecting users, technology and processes,” she says. “From that product management, product strategist, director of marketing and [I] ran a lot of very large global billion-dollar programs.” When it was time for her to move on to her next phase, she knew two things: One, she wanted to work in food; and two, she wanted to put her knowledge of product creation to good use. “I figured I could product manage myself and build my own company.” For almost nine months, she worked from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., then attended classes at the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts at 5 p.m., sometimes getting home well after midnight. She knew with her new culinary skills and her talent for product development she could do something great. Having lived in Austin for 32 years, Chevalier has a keen sense of the economic and food disparities within its communities. She founded The Cook's Nook in 2014 to not only address those disparities, but to put power back in the hands of the most underserved communities and the entrepreneurs who want to do something to spark change. Their food service group “makes high-quality meals for a reasonable cost that’s being used today to feed about 3,000 a day across Travis County in schools and residences,” she says. On January 27, the Cook’s Nook hosted its first Conference on Food Resilience, Access and Equity. The two-day virtual event featured Jason Mikell of KVUE as emcee, several keynotes and over 30 panels. It was a culmination of everything Chevalier has done within the Austin community. What disparities did the pandemic expose in your eyes? The lack of ownership relative to our white counterparts. The fact that products do get created in the Black community, but they tend to stay in the community. That might stem from this fear and lack of knowledge around financial literacy or the language of business. There's not just systemic barriers, there’s internal barriers as well. The fact that entrepreneurs didn’t have a place to share their tribal knowledge. 22 | AUSTIN WOMAN | FEBRUARY 2021
You had the idea for Keep Austin Together (an initiative providing supplemental prepared meals for families in need) long before the pandemic hit. What was the impetus to create it? The first week of March, when our own members were on their way out to Anaheim for Expo West, caterers and those who make food who don’t go…were shutting down. The people at CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) literally got out to California, they were on planes already coming back home. The thing that I saw was, we’re going to have new audiences of those who are working, but were barely getting by. We always think about the people who are food insecure today, or tomorrow, or the next day. But what about those who didn’t realize they were five days from being food insecure? I said, “What is the product that satisfies and helps this audience and uses what we have in our supply chain?” Because I know who has food that they can’t sell. I wrote it up and said, “We have the space and the capacity, and there are others like me.” It became Keep Austin Together, and it became SEFAN, the Supplementary Emergency Food Action Network. [I] submitted that to those I knew in the city. That was the fourth week of March. We were preparing meals by the end of April. Can you talk about the first Conference on Food Resilience, Access and Equity? Basically we have established and forged these new relationships between for-profits, nonprofits, government agencies in order to support our residents of Travis County and our neighbors. But whatever these new, innovative processes, activities and relationships are, we need to have them persist, we need to have resilience. We need to have a plan or an understanding of who to call, where to call and how to work for when this happens again, because it will happen again. So this conference has come about as a direct result of that, to get together, have those lessons. If we’ve learned that, we’ve got to be able to share it. Go to atxwoman.com for an expanded version of this interview. Photo by Chelsa King/Crowned Photography.
You could call Houston native Joi Chevalier a wonder
