The visionaries behind Rouxbe
Dawn Thomas & Joe Girard
Partners in life and in business, Joe Girard and Dawn Thomas revolutionized online culinary education. They combined culinary mastery, entrepreneurial grit, and a shared mission: to put a world-class culinary school in the hands of anyone, anywhere. In 2005, they founded Rouxbe.
Before Rouxbe
Shared roots & early ventures
Long before digital learning, Joe and Dawn were an unstoppable team. They built a large-scale mobile film-catering operation from the ground up, serving more than 250,000 cast and crew across the film industry.
It forged a rare talent: managing complex culinary logistics while standardizing exceptional food under intense pressure, the discipline that would later define Rouxbe.
cast & crew served
across the film industry
2005
Pioneering Rouxbe
The duo set out to do something unprecedented: capture a complete, professional culinary curriculum and deliver it in high-definition video to anyone, anywhere.
The creative force & voice
Dawn Thomas
Dawn graduated at the top of her class at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, then taught there. With over 25 years of professional experience, she brought both academic rigor and heart to Rouxbe. Direct, warm, funny, and entirely fearless, she was the primary voice, scriptwriter, and production powerhouse behind nearly every instructional video, reaching more than a million students worldwide.
The strategic execution
Joe Girard
Joe brought his culinary background, including his early days as a Chef de Partie at Fairmont Hotels, and sharp entrepreneurial foresight. When traditional investors doubted web-based culinary education, Joe steered the company away from a physical hardware prototype toward a fully online, scalable cloud platform.
The legacy
A lasting legacy & evolution
Together, Joe and Dawn scaled Rouxbe into the world's leading online culinary school, earning recognition from the American Culinary Federation. Their shared obsession with food and health led them to launch Swich, a platform teaching plant-forward cooking to the world for free.
True to their adventurous, forward-thinking spirit, they later moved to a 34-acre farm on Pender Island, British Columbia, living out their passion for sustainable, plant-based living.
In loving memory
Dawn Thomas
2026
On April 18, 2026, the culinary community lost Dawn Thomas, just one month after a terminal diagnosis. Dawn and Joe didn't only teach people how to cook. They transformed how the world learns to cook. Though Dawn is deeply missed, her standards, her voice, and her spirit remain permanently woven into the fabric of Rouxbe, inspiring generations of cooks to come.
Cooking is an act of love.
Dawn Thomas
The philosophy woven into every Rouxbe lesson.