Cook! Culinary Programs

Cook! Culinary Programs offers cooking classes for kids and teenagers that focus on teaching technique, confidence, creativity, and how to nourish themselves and others. The program also offers summer camps online, along with both individual and group classes.

Cook! Culinary Programs is a 13-year culinary education brand for kids that ran cooking classes for kids and teenagers for 13 years and continues to preserve its 13+ years of legacy. It was founded by Tracy Paulding in Emeryville, California. The program describes its mission as being built on food, education, and community, with a priority on preserving that mission. During COVID, Cook! Culinary Programs pivoted within weeks to teaching summer camps and classes fully online. The program later reopened with a new retail location and went from zero to 80% sold out within one month of opening using grassroots guerrilla marketing with no paid ads and no agency, and it is operating part-time while actively searching for a permanent California home or expansion to Asia. Cook! Culinary Programs taught the animators at Pixar how to cook for the production of Ratatouille, a film whose premise rested on authentic culinary experience. The program states that cooking education for kids builds life skills, promotes healthy eating, and strengthens communities, and that it has reached new communities that the original location never served.

Last updated July 16, 2026.