After finishing my culinary training, I was ready. Ready to cook, to travel, to bring nourishing food to retreat spaces and the people who passed through them. I had skills, I had passion, and I had a head full of recipes built for the kind of mindful, intentional eating that retreats call for.
What I didn't have was a clear path to finding the work.
My path took a few turns along the way — including opening my own retreat venue in Goa, which taught me just as much about this world from the other side. But throughout all of it, one question kept coming back to me: how do retreat chefs actually find work? And how do venues actually find them?
I was lucky in one sense — I had already spent a significant amount of time in Portugal and had built a small network there. That gave me a head start most people don't get. A few word-of-mouth leads, a few introductions over coffee. But it was fragile, and it was limited. What happened when I wanted to work in Bali, or Greece, or Costa Rica?
The main channel everyone seemed to use was Facebook groups. And let me be clear — they work. The communities are real, the people are generous, and I have found genuine opportunities through them. But as a system for matching talent with opportunity? They're chaotic. A post appears, thirty people comment, the right person may or may not be seen. There's no profile, no portfolio, no filter. You're essentially shouting into a room and hoping the right person hears you on the right day.
I did some digging. There are chef-specific portals for luxury villas and superyachts, and a few general retreat job boards that list chef roles alongside yoga teachers and volunteers. But a dedicated platform built specifically for retreat chefs — with profiles, specialisms, and direct connections to venues and facilitators — simply doesn't exist.
So I started asking around. I talked to fellow chefs, to facilitators, to venue owners. The frustration was universal. Venues couldn't find chefs they could trust. Chefs couldn't find consistent, meaningful work. Facilitators were piecing together teams through DMs and personal favours. Everyone was making do.
The answer became obvious: someone needed to build something. A proper platform — not a Facebook group, not a spreadsheet of contacts, not a favour economy — but a real, searchable, global space where retreat chefs can be found and where retreat leaders can find them.
That's what Tulsisphere is being built to be. A place where a chef who specialises in healing cuisine can showcase their work, set their availability, and be discovered by retreat venues anywhere in the world. And where venue owners and facilitators can post openings — for a weekend retreat, a month-long residency, or anything in between — and find exactly the right person.
It starts with chefs. Because that's where the gap is clearest, and that's where I know the need from the inside. But the vision is bigger: a full ecosystem connecting the people who build retreat experiences — the venues, the facilitators, the chefs — in one place.
We're just getting started. If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to have you along for the journey.