The Perfect Rise: Conversations with RBA

E19: Why We’re Losing Chefs — and How CHOW’s Fixing It

• The Retail Bakers of America Association • Episode 19

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What if the same passion that drives your success is quietly breaking you down?

In this powerful episode of The Perfect Rise, Chef Kimberly Houston sits down with Jasmin Vitolo Parks-Papadopoulos, Chief Growth Officer at CHOW (Culinary Hospitality Outreach & Wellness), to unpack the unspoken truth of life in hospitality — and what it really takes to build healthier kitchens.

You’ll hear:
 • The emotional story behind CHOW’s founding after Anthony Bourdain’s passing
• The “temperature take” check-in every kitchen needs to know
• Why burnout, anxiety, and substance misuse show up differently in our industry
• How the Amuse’ course helps leaders spot and support struggling staff
• The real language to use in hard conversations — thanks to CHOW’s legally vetted Scripts for Challenging Conversations
• One tiny, real-world action every owner, chef, or manager can take this week

CHOW’s mission is simple: Serving those who serve us.
Every meeting, every resource, every story is designed by people who’ve lived this life — chefs, bakers, servers, and owners committed to creating a more sustainable future for our industry.

💡 Get Involved
Join a free CHOW meeting or access resources: https://chowco.org
RBA Members: Find CHOW resources inside RBA Connect
Free Tools: Amuse’ Course • Workplace Wellness Toolkit • Scripts for Challenging Conversations

Become a Member

Kimberly Houston (00:01)

Hey friends and welcome back to The Perfect Rise. I'm Chef Kimberly Houston and today we're talking about something that too often gets left out of the kitchen, mental health.


My guest is Jasmine Papadopoulos, the chief growth officer at CHOW, Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness. Jasmine is a third generation chef who, like many of us, built her identity around the work she loved until the great resignation forced her to pause, reflect, and rebuild from a place of wellness. Through CHOW, she now helps others do the same by leading conversations around mental health, building safe community spaces,


and giving food and hospitality professionals the tools they need to thrive, not just survive, in this industry. If you've ever wondered how to talk about wellness at work or what it means to truly support your team from the inside out, this episode is going to resonate. Let's dive in.


Kimberly Houston (01:02)

Welcome back guys. I am super, super excited to bring this episode to you today. We are going to be talking with Chow and I am so excited to be talking to Jasmine Parks Papadolus. Did I say that right? Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos.


I think it was Kismet we were supposed to meet. And now to be able to bring this conversation to our audience, I think is going to make a really big impact in the industry. So as we jump into this conversation, can you tell me how Chow was born? what inspired its creation?


Yeah, absolutely. This is one of my favorite questions. chow is about to turn eight this coming summer. So just a few short years ago, we were a baby nonprofit that started out of Denver, Colorado. Our founder, John Hinman, who still owns and operates Hinman Pies, is a phenomenal pie maker. Shout out to Salted Maple, the best Hinman pie flavor.


⁓ And he had embarked on a journey to recovery. And when he returned to the industry sober, he found that a lot of the discomfort that had ⁓ driven his substance misuse was still there. And so he asked himself in an industry where we often neglect physical injury, how do we start to talk about the pain that we can't see, which lives inside of us?


And so this question led him to invite a few food beverage hospitality workers in the Denver area to his bakery at the time. And what could have been just a couple of people getting together at the bakery to have a brief conversation actually ended up being a room full of people that were incredibly moved to speak because just a few short days before the meeting, Anthony Bourdain completed suicide. And so our community was rocked.


So he found himself in a room full of chefs and servers and bakers and industry vets who were really, really ready to show up for themselves and to talk about the pain that they had been hiding inside for so many years. And then that meeting met up again the Monday following.


And then the Monday following, and then our now CEO, Aaron Boyle, got involved as a volunteer and brought the meeting to Boulder. Then I was involved in Colorado Springs and I brought the meeting to Colorado Springs. And then, you know, the pandemic afforded us this incredible privilege of being able to move to a hybrid model. So now our meetings, currently there's 10, 10 of them on the books ⁓ weekly. We have dedicated spaces for men, women, LGBTQIA plus members and Spanish speaking members as well.


They happen every day of the week on rotation and they are hybrid. So in-person and online as well, accessible from anywhere. And that's kind of how we got started. Wow. That is incredible. ⁓ So before we jump into the rest of my questions, can you tell me a little bit more about your involvement with the organization and what exactly it is that you do at CHOW? Absolutely. So I came as an attendee, really.


I was a third generation chef. I worked halfway through the pandemic. I was introduced to Chow when I was head of food and beverage of a pretty high profile hotel group. I had introduced the resource to my general manager and folks were already starting to report struggling with their mental health a little bit at the beginning of the pandemic, right before the furloughing and all of that complicated pattern of...


behavior towards food, beverage, hospitality workers started. And so I wanted to bring that resource to my staff. I had read about the chow temperature to take, which is essentially checking in on a scale of rare to well done. Rare meaning juicy, full of life, well done ⁓ meaning I've been on the grill for far too long. I can't take any more heat. ⁓ We do this out of recognition of the fact that food, beverage, hospitality workers often have a lot more words and descriptor words for our product, for our food than we have for our feelings.


So we use a skill that we already have, which is being very handy with adjectives and describing things. And we turn it towards ourselves in an act of what we call self-service. So I had read about the temperature take and I wanted to check in with my team and my GM said, all right, well, what happens when everybody checks in ⁓ at a well done? We don't have the resources to be sending folks home or to restaff a shift. This has to keep going. Dinner service has to happen.


What is your plan for what to do? I didn't have a plan at the time, so I let it be. I left the industry and I struggled immensely for the first few months with finding my sense of self and gathering my bearings as a person, finding my sense of self and rediscovering my sense of personhood outside of the industry. I very quickly realized that because I had experienced no work-life balance,


that I didn't have any hobbies, I didn't have any interests, I didn't have a lot of friendships that weren't the trauma bonds that I made in the industry. And so essentially when I left the industry, a big part of my identity just disappeared overnight. And so I remembered that Chow existed and I reached out to Erin, who's our now CEO, and I said, you know, I'm looking into getting a wellness certification, which I was doing at the time because at the age of 35, I have no self care skills at all.


I had spent the majority of my adult life eating cold food over a trash can, right? Having more caffeine than water. And so I thought to myself, you know, why don't I return to school and get a wellness certification and find out what it means to get better, right? Let me integrate. And so I thought to myself, let me go contribute to this community. Let me go volunteer. It's a way to give back. ⁓ And Erin encouraged me to come to a couple of meetings to see the work that they were doing. At this point, I had never checked it out. So.


The first meeting I went and I was like, you know, this is bizarre. It's just, it feels like a bunch of chefs sitting in a room complaining about their feelings. And yeah, I don't know. I never struggled like that when I was in the industry. So this might not actually be for me. I had promised myself that I was going to do three meetings just to give it a fair shake. ⁓ By meeting three, I am now bawling throughout the duration of the entire meeting and realizing that there's a lot of trauma that I was holding in and that


⁓ this ability to thrive through it, is a, a challenging reality that I've had to face over and over again, because the truth is that the worst my mental health was when I was in the industry, the better my career was doing. I was diagnosed with high functioning anxiety very late in life and it afforded me the privilege of showing up like a person who was always very organized, very on top of things. A go-getter, ⁓ didn't let things fall through the crack, but I paid a very heavy price for it.


So I started off as a volunteer. I brought the meeting to Colorado Springs. Then I very briefly got involved with our social media management. Now, spoiler alert, I had convinced myself that I had been a chef my entire life and there was nothing else that I could do. Meanwhile, I have a bachelor's in marketing and communications. And so with a lot of mentorship from Erin, who was like, why don't you dip your toe in the water and see what it means to.


return to the workforce like this and try something else. I am currently five years in, six years if we count that volunteer year, and I am Chow's chief growth officer. What that means is that throughout the last few years, I've cross-trained in every position. I've done our amused mental health course, I've run our social media, I have been an expose, which is the person that mediates our conversations in the room. I've been a volunteer host.


And I find myself in the uniquely privileged position of understanding the machinations of how Chow works as a community. And so as chief growth officer, I serve as kind of the funnel between departments where I keep my finger on the pulse of the food, beverage, hospitality community by doing all of our media in reach and outreach. And I bring a lot of the need and conversations that I see happening in the food, beverage, hospitality industry to our back end leadership team and


because we are a listening organization, we take that information and we turn it into programs, educational panels, workshops, and I assist on the back end in doing that as well. Wow. Yes. It is a lot, it's so passion-driven, mission-driven, ⁓ and one of those things that I don't think people really talk about.


with this industry, like when I closed my bakery, the thing I kept saying to people is you've never met an old pastry chef. Like you've met old chefs, right? But you've literally never met an old pastry chef. And I'm like, there's a reason that you've never met one because this is just not that type of industry where you're going to be super, super longevity as a pastry chef specifically. And


the more I said that to people throughout the pandemic, the more people really started being like, wait a minute, I really haven't. no one warned me in culinary school that like, if you get injured, but you've wrapped your entire identity up in being a chef, there's gonna be a crisis when you can no longer do that thing that you've always done. And for me personally, I went through that.


And so like, I get it physically. There was a breakdown which led to the mental breakdown. So being in physical therapy and in therapy at the same time, those two things working in tandem, because when you wake up and your hands don't work and you're a chef, what do you do? Right? And so that has been my story since November of 2020, ⁓ which had no idea that was going come up on this podcast,


So for those who are listening to this podcast episode, I think the one thing I want to tell you is if you're suffering in silence, you don't have to be alone. So I'm glad we're having this conversation. So as we move through this, we know that this industry is full of long hours, a lot of pressure and perfectionism.


So what are some of the biggest mental health or wellness challenges you're seeing people face right now?


⁓ goodness. Well, we have incredibly high rates of burnout. think we have consistently in the last 10 years been in the top three professional industries for substance misuse and rates of suicide. So top three is staggering. For a very long time, we were number one in both. I think that we see, you know, there's this great chef


Patrick Mulvaney out of California who started an organization called I Got Your Back. And he asks the very impactful question, did we break people when they got to the food beverage hospitality industry or did they show up broken because we kind of called them in with the way that we work? And I have spent the last few years thinking about this in a very intense way because there's a lot of...


There's a certain personality type that thrives in a high stakes environment like a kitchen. There's a personality type that likes waking up in the middle of the night so that they could cook ⁓ in a very quiet kitchen so that they could bake in a very quiet kitchen. There's a personality type that likes being around people and so they choose to be a server who is going to have a theatrical element to putting together a phenomenal memory of a dinner.


we ask ourselves, we try to be very intentional when asking, what do people clock in with when they're clocking in? It's not just their apron, their knife roll, their tools. What are they bringing? And so here's what we know, that a lot of times mental health shows up differently in our industry. And so we have an amazing amuse mental health course. It's a four hour course where we talk specifically about how to spot mental health in our industry. Because when you do,


clock into a kitchen, a commissary kitchen, a bakery, a restaurant, a hotel, whatever that looks like. There are a lot of things that are gonna look differently to a person with anxiety who's clocking into an office, right? Like I just shared a personal example of how it made me look like I was great at my job, because I was clocking in three hours ahead of everyone, missing every single family event that I could fathom.


I think we have incredibly high rates of depression, right? 84 % of food, beverage, hospitality workers report feeling pushed to the brink of burnout. And these are self-reported numbers, right? So keep in mind that there's a hefty amount of people that are definitely not being very forthcoming with this information because we don't have a lot of education as to what the consequences with being forthcoming with that information.


Up until very recently and still in some independently owned businesses, when a person is struggling and they go share that with leadership and management, sometimes, oftentimes, the default reaction can be, well, I'm just going to take a couple of shifts away from you and give you some time to relax, which can feel really punitive to a person who might be struggling financially outside of that, right? Because a lot of us are shift workers, because we are hourly workers, because we are commission-based, because we are tip-based.


We try as much as we can when talking about mental health to also talk about the intersectionality of wellness to keep in mind that ⁓ folks show up with mental health and that mental health shows up completely differently in our field and the things that we might be looking for when seeing if somebody is struggling might not look the way they look in a nine to five job when folks are sitting shoulder to shoulder at an office, for example.


you mentioned the amuse course. Let's talk about that for a second. So how does it help managers, chefs, and teams start creating a culture of wellness in their workplace? Yes. I love this question. So for us, we were a kind of a...


cup half full organization, right? We don't wanna talk about these staggering statistics without giving a solution. The point is not for us to just bring to the light these awful numbers and folks that we keep losing because they fall through the cracks of care. We do this because we believe that we can't get to where we wanna go if we don't fully evaluate where we're going, what we've got going on, what our strengths and weaknesses, struggles and successes are before we go forward, right?


So in our Amuse Mental Health course, we start first and foremost by talking about how mental health and substance misuse shows up in our industry. So how to recognize the signs that somebody is struggling, ⁓ how to offer support and resources without relying very strongly on that historical hierarchy.


that we see in the food, beverage, hospitality industry that can lead to burnout simply because we've got a manager up here who's now in charge of the mental health and scheduling and financial wellness of 22 people when they are also under resource marginalized, isolated, know, feeling their own pressures. So we start with recognizing the challenges and empowering everybody shoulder to shoulder with the same resources so that we can get help. Through that, we start talking about role modeling.


using those resources because that's going to be number one step in self-service and the team feeling wellness is going to be when we try out one thing and share it with the team. And then we move steadily into assertive communication, right? Because we know that there's so much, ⁓ there can be so much aggressive communication, a lot of it nonverbal in our spaces because of the way that we work. And then we move into the eight.


ingredients of wellness in which we recognize that wellness is intersectional. And so we give an adequate amount of attention to all eight areas so that we can achieve a well-balanced kind of ⁓ approach to wellness. And our course is designed by food, beverage, hospitality workers for food, beverage, hospitality workers so that we can kind of ⁓


achieve a brief but comprehensive overview of the challenges that are affecting workplace wellness in our industry. we 100 % will have links down in the show notes for people to be able to sign up for that, to even get to the meetings, I definitely wanted to highlight that so that people know that there are resources and there are ways for you to get help.


if people still feel uncomfortable having these conversations in professional kitchens, what advice would you have to start normalizing these discussions without fear of judgment? Is this something that's like top?


down? Is there certain terminology that people should be using or saying? do you have any advice for people who may be listening and they're like, well, how do we even like have this conversation to move it forward?


What are your thoughts on that? I love this one. Okay. ⁓ I think we just role modeled something completely unexpected, ⁓ serendipitous because I shared a little bit about my story, which prompted you to share a little bit about your story. And you said yourself, you know, in an unscripted conversation, you said, I didn't expect that this was going to come up today, but here we are. And so.


I believe that when we share in safe, protected spaces, right? So you and I have ⁓ met twice before this. And so we have a reasonable amount of human trust in which I can exchange a little bit of my humanity with yours and have a conversation. And so what happens when I share of my own story in a way that feels


safe to me. Not only does that fulfill my mission of personal advocacy because I do not want to see folks struggle anymore, but what it does is, I believe, it gives you permission and anyone else permission to also follow suit. so mirroring a lot of what we want to see in the food, beverage, hospitality industry, I believe is step one. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that we acknowledge the fact that there's a power differential here, right?


One of the reasons why we know that it can be challenging to have these conversations is because we don't know what the consequence is to having those conversations. Folks report to us all the time, I would like to talk about XYZ, but I don't want to be punished for it. I don't want my shifts taken away. I don't know if I could lose my job. We heard this overwhelming feedback and we don't want to approach these conversations from a culture of fear. We want to create psychological safety in the workplace.


So we have this exceptional, and I would encourage anybody who's listening to go download it right now. On our website, chowco.org, you can look at our workplace wellness tools. In our workplace wellness tools, we have an incredibly dense document called the scripts for challenging conversations. These scripts for challenging conversations are actual scripts for how to ask hard questions like, I think you might be struggling with your mental health. I've noticed you clocking in five days in a row.


your uniform is looking, is sloppier, is looking different, you know, and you are a person who's usually meticulous about your, your appearance. You're clocking in later and later every day. I'm seeing signs of struggle. How can I assist you? Because we have had folks say, I'm noticing this and I don't know how to ask without getting in trouble. So we put together these scripts. We had them vetted by trauma informed mental health care providers who can make sure that both folks on each side of the conversation are safe.


And then we have them vetted by employment lawyers to make sure that we are not creating any kind of violation by asking these questions, that we are just coming at it from a place of ⁓ concern and love and respect for our fellow human beings, but that we are not creating unsafe situations. if you are, if.


listening to this podcast is bringing up a certain interaction that you had at work where you're like, gosh, I would have really liked to know what to say in that instance, but I'm not sure what I could have done better. Download those scripts and take that instance or incident that you have in mind as your guide and look through them. There's like 70 pages. There's an index where you can go based on each theme and you can go look at those scripts. The short.


⁓ answer is empower yourself with any resource that is going to make you feel safe and protected to have the very challenging conversation because we believe that step one to de-stigmatizing and breaking apart these, ⁓ these conversations that have been historically super challenging to bring to the light is when we speak truth to them and we bring our human experience to


for any bakery cafe owner executive chef that's listening to this what is one small but meaningful step they can take this week to support their team's well-being.


OK, well, you might not like this one because this one's a little Pinteresty. It's a little bit of a cross stitch quote that you might see on a wall somewhere. Try something out for yourself. Invest in your own wellness this week and then speak honestly, openly, candidly, and consistently about it to your team. And I mean, get granular. So it might have to look like, Kimberly, you'll never believe it. So ⁓ last week, I went to a child meeting.


⁓ It was, it took about two minutes to figure out how to get to the child meeting on the website. When I showed up, they told me I could keep my camera off. So I went ahead and kept my camera off. The meeting lasted about an hour. There was a person who was doing a temperature take. I felt kind of intimidated at the thought of a temperature take and I didn't really love it, but I kind of hung out. It was fine. I think around the 45 minute mark, somebody said something that really resonated with me that I've been thinking about ever since.


So I would say if you ever want to try it out for yourself, the tech was super easy. One of the things that I really enjoyed was that folks in the room seemed to get it. I might give it a try, you know, maybe next week. If you want to go with me, ⁓ feel free or I could just share a flyer with you. Anyway, just wanted to share. This is the way ⁓ that we give folks permission, allowing our experience to become a roadmap.


for someone else for the very practical things that sometimes, let's be honest, they could be prohibitive. Like if I don't know who's going to be there at that meeting and I have a little bit of social anxiety, I might not want to go. If I don't know what to expect from my first therapy session, I might not want to go. If I don't know what the employee assistance, what the consequences, is there any punishment for using this employee assistance program, I might not use it. This is what we hear from folks all the time, right? I have an employee assistance program at an incredibly low usage rate. OK.


are the folks who are using the employee assistance sharing with their teams about what the process looks like, what the struggles were, what the successes were. So if you are looking for one small takeaway to create a healthful ripple of change in your community, pick something to try out for yourself to invest in your own personal wellness this week. It could be using your smoke break to take a walk around the block while you are smoking, right? Harm reduction. It could be having a


switching off tasks that you don't enjoy doing with your roommate because you've got a whole bunch of clopens or because you don't have days off this week and then find a person that you can share the successes and struggles of the thing that you tried with, share it with them. when we think about the industry over the next five years, what is your hope for the hospitality industry and where does CHOW fit into that vision?


Well, I, with your permission, I would like to extend it to seven years. say this often. I have ⁓ an 11 year old child who is thinking about becoming a chef. And so I have seven years to fix the industry before she's going out into the world. yeah, I've got it on my to-do list daily to just fix it all up, tie it up with a neat bow for tomorrow's generation. When I think about


But honestly, when I think about the next five years, think one about the integration of the younger generation, which seems to be very adept, passionate, and honed in on personal advocacy and mental health. We hear that in so many workplaces nowadays. This younger generation is all about their mental health and work-life balance and this and that, and how wonderful.


Right? That dinosaurs like myself would get to learn from a younger generation coming in and saying, hey, I really want to enjoy Christmas with my family. really want to celebrate my birthday. Hey, I need to day off not because I need to do something, but because I miss my partner and I want to spend time with my partner. What an incredible gift that we have been given in this younger generation. So one, I personally, on a personal note, believe in the recalibration of


you know, people coming in with new values and ideas and how they're going to shake up that industry. Two, I am encouraged by the increase of resources that I see organizations like Chow doing incredible job. Shout out to the Giving Kitchen, Southern Smoke, Restaurant After Hours, not 9 to 5, organizations that are popping up and truly framing food, beverage, hospitality workers at the centerpiece of the workforce and saying, how do we help?


this demographic, how do we do it financially with their mental health, with their work life balance, with their cross training in case they want to leave the industry or pursue leadership in the industry, right? So there's an incredible amount of work happening there. And when I first started out with Chow, it wasn't very often, but sometimes we would do outreach calls where we would just very gorilla go out and give flyers and invite folks to come to meetings and


It wasn't always that we were welcomed with open arms. People used to be very diffident of a person showing up to their workplace with a flyer about mental health. And I imagine that I would have been too, right? If somebody had walked into my kitchen, I would have been like, who sent you? Who told you we have a problem here? There's no problems here. Get out of my kitchen. And that has been the complete opposite of what we've received in last few years. People are grateful to see us.


happy that the organization exists. They're framing us at the forefront of a lot of conversations that we can assist in mediating. They're welcoming us to educational panels. We believe that wherever we're talking about the sustainability of ingredients, the sustainability of a process, safeguarding a recipe, we need to also be talking about the sustainability of human beings and future-proofing for human beings and safeguarding.


human beings. And so that is my dream for Chow in the next few years, that all of these candid conversations that we continue to have, because we are a creative industry, we're an innovative industry, we are pioneering in so many ways, especially when it comes to our processes, our ingredients, and our ideas, we want to see that extend to human beings as well. And that's my big dream for the next few years. I love it. It's a big dream, but I feel like it can happen.


wholeheartedly have attached to your vision. For people who are just now hearing about CHOW for the first time, how can they join a meeting, bring a training to their team, or get involved in supporting the mission? Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, you can visit our website. That's ⁓ www.chowco.org.


You can fill out a contact us form that routes directly to my inbox. So if you're listening to this and you are feeling moved to action or you have questions or you're wondering how we can bring this to your workplace, send over an email. We do pre-shift conversations is what we call them where we are able to come into our workplace virtually and we just let folks know that Chow exists, how they can access a meeting, invite them to join our mental health course. All of our services are completely free of cost. People can't use them if they don't know about them.


So taking a look at our website and seeing if anything jumps out at you. Additionally, if you have a community or a business or you are a part of a community that is interested in receiving child resources, you send over an email, we'll send over flyers, QR codes, anything you need so that you can get connected. The first step, think, would be the visiting our website, following us on social so that you can stay up to date with all of our community initiatives.


I have goosebumps. Sharing this conversation with our audience, we will definitely make sure we put everything you just said down in the show notes as well as on the RBA website. Chow is definitely one of our resources.


Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me today. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for having me and for sharing so vulnerably of your own human experience too. I think this is exactly the power of being able to talk about our shared human experience with folks who get it. Small ripples of healthful changes. Thank you.


Kimberly Houston (30:48)

Before we wrap up, I just want to say, if today's conversation stirred something in you, that's okay. You're not alone in that. Jasmine reminded us that wellness isn't a trend.


It's a necessity. And creating healthier kitchens doesn't start with a policy. It starts with one conversation, one check-in, one person choosing to model something different. You can take that first step right now by visiting chowco.org to find a free meeting, explore the Amuse course, or download Chow scripts for challenging conversations. Every tool is built by people who've lived this life, chefs, bakers, servers, and owners.


all committed to creating a better path forward. And if you're a part of the RBA, you can also access CHOW directly inside of RBA Connect. I'm Chef Kimberly Houston, and this is The Perfect Rise, where we celebrate the people behind the pastry and the purpose behind the plate. Until next time, keep showing up, keep rising, and take care of yourself and your team.



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