The Academy
A structured business education for professional chefs, taught in kitchen language, built around a working venue.
The business education the industry never built
Professional cookery training is excellent at producing cooks and almost silent on the business those cooks work inside. Chefs are promoted into roles that require reading a P&L, controlling prime cost, engineering a menu for margin and leading a team, and are expected to work all of it out on the job.
The Academy is the structured alternative. Five modules across twenty-five weeks, taking a chef from reading a profit and loss statement for the first time through to running a kitchen as a controlled operation and managing their own career with evidence.
It is written for people who work on the pass. No consultant vocabulary, no theory without application, and every exercise built on figures a chef actually sees.
Five modules, taken in sequence
Financial Foundations
Prime cost, stock movement, labour productivity, dish contribution, and reading a P&L line by line.
Menu Engineering
True ingredient cost after yield, contribution classification, price anchoring, and designing revenue into the menu.
Operational Systems, Labour and Performance
Standardised production, stock control, demand-based rostering, and a weekly operating scorecard.
Leadership and Team Management
Setting and holding standards, feedback, retention and the true cost of turnover, and leading under pressure.
Your Career, Your Business
Capability assessment, professional positioning, and a portfolio of evidence built from the student's own work.
One case venue, carried across every module
All five modules run inside the Kitchen Lab: a dinner-led coastal café, around 90 seats, $2.4 million in annual revenue, operating at a deliberately stressed prime cost.
The venue's figures build cumulatively. A costing corrected in Module 2 changes a classification made in Module 1. Systems designed in Module 3 protect the margin engineered in Module 2. By the final module the student has run a complete operating cycle on a single business before applying the same analysis to their own kitchen.
Material is released weekly and gated on completion, so students work one week properly before the next opens. Each module closes with an assessment or capstone and an optional wrap-up session.
Chefs with responsibility, or heading toward it
Students range from chefs de partie building toward their first leadership role through to head chefs, executive chefs and owner-operators already carrying financial responsibility.
The common factor is not seniority. It is that they were trained to cook and never taught the commercial side of the job they now hold.
On a venue turning over $100,000 a week, letting prime cost drift by three points costs roughly $156,000 a year. Nobody decides to lose it. It leaks while everyone is busy doing their job.
Ricardo Calderini
Around twenty years in professional kitchens, and a bachelor's degree in business administration and finance. Trained at a leading university in Brazil and worked in corporate roles before choosing the kitchen instead.
Five businesses owned. That combination is why the Academy exists: the finance training to know what the numbers mean, and enough years on the pass to know what they feel like at 7pm on a Saturday.
Two ways in
The full programme, or the first module on its own. Module 1 stands alone and credits toward the Academy if a student continues.