Launched just 2 years ago, La Belle Assiette continues to disrupt the world of gastronomy across Europe and is squarely on their way to becoming the world’s largest private chef service. Over the last 12 months, the La Belle Assiette team have been pushing hard on rolling out across Europe with expansions into Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the UK. Growing in new geographies of course requires them to not only sell the La Belle Assiette service, but also recruit and validate hundreds of new chefs, drawing on a pool of 5k validation jury members made up of passionate customers, journalists and bloggers.
What could have been a long and difficult recruitment process, turned out to be an extremely fruitful one for them. Just one year ago, the company managed a network of 230 Chefs. This number has already more than doubled with the team just announcing the arrival of the 500th Chef to the La Belle Assiette community, Lille (France)-based Stephanie Belmonte.
Working as chef is a notoriously difficult and precarious job. La Belle Assiette’s objective has always been to help chefs become entrepreneurs and, in essence, free themselves from needing to bear the cost and high risk of opening their own restaurants, working long and poorly paid hours in restaurant kitchens, or managing the administrative or marketing side of setting off on their own. Most La Belle Assiette chefs still marry working in a more permanent job, cooking or otherwise, and their La Belle Assiette clients. However, there are some chefs that have become so successful on the platform that they are now 100% full-time La Belle Assiette chefs.
Their community of 500 chefs is extremely high quality, with some known standouts in the culinary sector. Some examples include:
- Florian Chatelard who is now participating in Top Chef 2015 in France
- Steven Edwards, the winner of Masterchef in 2013
- Andrea Zaaggti and Alec Maxfield, who received their training at Michelin-starred restaurants.
With all this growth, they are also rapidly scaling up the size of their team, looking to bring 11 new colleagues on-board. They’ll also be recruiting at our Paris Startup Job Fair on 28 March. So, if you’d like to meet the La Belle Assiette team in person to see what cool opportunities they have to offer, make sure to sign-up here.