Meet Jessica

I became a pastry chef for one simple reason:

I love making people happy.

Some of my earliest memories are baking for my family. As I grew older, that joy naturally expanded to friends, coworkers, and anyone lucky enough to end up around my kitchen.

Choosing culinary school wasn't difficult for me. I knew I wanted to spend my life creating food that brought people together and made them smile.

Working in New York City's fine dining kitchens taught me incredible technique, discipline, and craftsmanship but somewhere along the way, I lost the joy that first brought me there.

So I stepped away.

Yet no matter where life took me, I always found myself back in the kitchen.

Whether I was teaching children's cooking classes at my local library, baking fresh bread for coworkers, or making chocolate bars from home, creating food never stopped being the place where I felt most like myself.

Life brought its share of challenges: a heartbreaking pregnancy loss, divorce, and eventually the devastating loss of my first home to a fire shortly followed by the death of my best friend.

Those experiences changed me but they never changed what I believed.

They reminded me that joy isn't something we're given once, it's something we choose to create again and again.

Phoenix Foods was born from that belief.

The phoenix has always symbolized resilience, the ability to rise again after hardship. For me, it also represents something quieter: the simple act of returning to the things that make us feel alive.

For me, that's baking.

Every cookie, loaf of bread, brownie, and seasonal creation is handcrafted using the techniques I learned as a professional pastry chef and made with the same purpose that first inspired me as a little girl in my family's kitchen.