Why Your Culinary Skills Deserve to be Entrepreneurial in 2018 You are an entrepreneur cum artist while you showcase your cooking skills

With entrepreneurship today focussing on aspects related to problem solving and mitigation of issues, it should do no harm for you to turn an entrepreneur and employ your entrepreneurial skills towards ensuring that people's problems are solved. In this regard, a problem though underrated but still major, has been to cater to peoples' taste buds.

Cooking aka exhibition of culinary skills qualifies as entrepreneurship considering the fact that most of today's restaurants have broken the conservative approach and have gone global whilst absorbing latest global trends. Also, with the hotel management courses now finding comparatively increased takers, being a chef is not bad provided you have the culinary acumen.

With showcasing of culinary skills being the criteria, Entrepreneur India explores why the cooking trend is worth exploring in modern times:

• Follow your Passion: The most important thing is the passion in you for your work which can take you to the top, without the stereotype set norms of the industry. We have people like Nigella Lawson, who followed their passion and made a platform for themselves. Same goes with ladies like Tarla Dalal and Madhur Jaffrey who never had a formal degree in cooking but the love for cooking made her world famous. Madhur Jaffrey is the one credited of taking Indian cooking to US and making it a household name. She is the food consultant for some of the biggest brands. people would be surprised that she comes from a different field altogether and has studied Dramatics. So the outcome is just be passionate for cooking.

• Greater problem solving potential: Today, with the hospitality industry seeing consistent upward growth, the potential to cater to the vast majority naturally exists. Also, your culinary skills could actually mitigate the problem of having to cook for people who consider the task as cumbersome and time-consuming. You need not be an executive chef to cook for people; you could be a freelance chef working at multiple homes preparing delicious food. You could also get paid handsomely whilst caring for people (through good food).
  

• Showcase creative acumen: Creativity today is not just restricted to drawing and painting; the best chefs in the world are also artists considering the fact that they lace their food with artistic decorations to make the preparations visually refreshing. Also, recipes can be developed artistically through a combination of different ingredients thereby adding a creative touch to your cooking, and entrepreneurship.
  

• Wider Recognition: Showcasing your culinary acumen is one entrepreneurial area which gets you comparatively wider recognition. You could even design and execute your own crockery shows and present unique recipes. In case these are viewed as innovative, you stand to gain both professionally as well as financially considering the fact that culinary reachability is now global.
  

• Relatively easier to setup businesses: Culinary entrepreneurs enjoy the advantage of the Start Small, Think Big approach. You could set up a business to cater to weddings and social gatherings at first, and gradually expand to the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry provided you cater effectively to your target audience. The advantage in the culinary business is the revenue model is comparatively easier to set up as the earnings are direct from end consumers (B2C). This also potentially translates to opportunities (multiple target segments to cater to).
  

• Offbeat approaches exist: If you are a culinary entrepreneur, it is not a mandate that you need to be a cook/chef. You could be a food blogger, reviewing food across the various restaurants in India (and abroad) and reporting this in your own blog. Also, you could be a freelance food reviewer, working on multiple corporate projects at any given point in time. Hence offbeat opportunities are comparatively higher in the culinary industry.