What we talked about
Erin Fletter is a serial entrepreneur, five-time cookbook author, and 30-year veteran of the food and hospitality world who turned a simple idea at her Denver kitchen table into Sticky Fingers Cooking®:a plant-forward children’s cooking school and social enterprise that has taught more than 200,000 kids the joy of cooking. In this conversation with host Federico Ramallo, Erin shares how a single after-school class inspired a national “cooking school without walls” that meets kids where they are: in schools, camps, and community centers.
Show notes
Erin Fletter struggled in school as a child, and now runs a national education company that has taught over 200,000 kids to cook. She built a proprietary technology platform over 13 years before most people knew what that meant, entirely by accident, starting with a college roommate’s husband who could “write a little something” to replace their 2 a.m. Excel spreadsheets.
What we covered
- Sticky Fingers Cooking started in 2011 at Erin’s Denver kitchen table after she watched her daughter thrive in an after-school taekwondo program and wondered why cooking couldn’t work the same way. The key insight was going to where kids already are, schools, rather than requiring families to travel to a storefront, which eliminated overhead and made the model scalable almost immediately.
- The curriculum goes far beyond recipes: every class teaches food history (macaroni and cheese involves Thomas Jefferson and a trip to Paris), what childhood is like in the country the dish comes from, one featured ingredient explored in depth, and “scrumptious science”, like demonstrating emulsification by shaking oil and vinegar together. Erin designed the learning she wished had existed when she was a student who found school boring.
- The “not so secret miracle” of the program is that kids who prepare food will eat it. Erin uses a ratio of one sweet recipe per month to hook reluctant eaters, followed by three savory recipes, and the sweet opener consistently converts kids into trying foods from Ethiopia, Thailand, and Argentina they might otherwise refuse.
- The franchise model emerged after Erin researched women’s business ownership statistics and found that less than 2% of female-owned businesses gross over a million dollars annually. She saw franchising as a way to create new business owners in underserved communities, today, over 50% of Sticky Fingers franchise owners are minorities, across 20 territories in 10 states.
- The Sticky Fingers Cooking Dash, their proprietary technology platform, now runs 85% of day-to-day operations across all franchise locations, handling everything from chef instructor timecards and KPI reports to logistics and allergy tracking. Unlike most tech companies, they built the software step by step as the actual business grew, adding only features they genuinely needed.
- Erin describes the franchise model’s core value as reversing the 80% small business failure rate: where 80% of independent businesses fail after five years, 80% of franchise owners succeed, because franchisees inherit 14 years of iterated best practices and can focus entirely on human connection and local growth.
About Erin
Erin Fletter is the founder and CEO of Sticky Fingers Cooking, a national plant-forward children’s cooking school and social enterprise based in Denver, Colorado. She is also a serial entrepreneur, five-time cookbook author, and 30-year veteran of the food and hospitality industry.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-fletter-74b24454
- Website: https://stickyfingerscooking.com
Episode 81 of the PreVetted Podcast.