• Meenu Bhasin and Melanie Underwood operate solo cooking companies, with some help from AI.
• They said AI helps them research ingredients, plan events, and develop social strategy.
• The chefs said AI can't replace the human touch in teaching and tasting.

An hour before a recent private cooking class, chef and solopreneur Meenu Bhasin got a message: one of the children attending had a severe egg allergy. Two of her planned recipes required eggs.

"They said, if you want to cancel, we understand," Bhasin told Business Insider. "But I'm not going to do that."

With no staff to help her, she opened ChatGPT, typed in every ingredient she had on hand, and asked it to come up with two simple, egg-free recipes for young children. "It delivered," she said. "Before ChatGPT, that would have been a lot of stress."

It's one of the many ways that Bhasin and another chef, Melanie Underwood of Nourish & Gather, use generative AI for behind-the-scenes operational support in their solo cooking ventures.

The AI-Powered Solopreneur series explores how solo business owners use AI to drive growth.

Tailoring client experiences with generative AI

For Bhasin, who has run her Bay Area cooking company for more than 15 years, much of her time preparing for classes is spent building menus that cater to a unique combination of dietary restrictions, preferences, and kitchen constraints.

Since she started using ChatGPT about a year and a half ago, the process has become more streamlined, Bhasin told Business Insider.

Bhasin said she might get an email from a group that has a wide range of dietary needs and tastes, from pescatarians to gluten free, and she has to create an experience that will work for everyone. "I'm like, 'oh my goodness, ChatGPT, what can I teach this group?,'" she said.

She'll also use ChatGPT to research ingredient swaps, such as finding alternatives to sesame seeds and soy sauce that still deliver the salty, spicy, and sweet notes essential to an Asian cooking class.

Still, Bhasin said the final call is always hers. "It gives me the legwork, and then I have to go in, use those ingredients, and make sure it actually tastes good."

Underwood, a Westchester-based culinary educator and chef, said she also uses AI to tailor her standard program materials for different audiences.

When she recently ran her nutrition program for a group of eight men in a corporate setting, she asked Anthropic's Claude to help her reframe the content with a more data-driven lens. Underwood said she always double checks the studies that Claude cites before using them.

AI lessens the load of event management

Underwood said that generative AI has been especially useful for planning her cooking workshops.

She'll upload her recipes to Claude, tell it the number of participants, then prompt it to multiply the recipe ingredients and list out which equipment she needs to bring.

"That is so helpful for scalability, because then I'm actually not having to sit and write out all of those things," Underwood said, adding that this allows her to focus more on the creative side of her work.

Bhasin said that AI helps her better manage client communications, which often requires her to email each group back and forth several times before their class. Generative AI helps her work through her thoughts around specific requests and draft difficult messages in a diplomatic tone, Bhasin added.

When five parents recently asked her to change an already-advertised summer camp menu to suit their children, she consulted ChatGPT before responding.

"ChatGPT asked me: 'What is your goal here? Is it to make as much money as possible, or is it to teach a high-quality camp?'" she said.

With those questions in mind, Bhasin revisited her initial reasons for choosing the planned theme. Ultimately, that process led her to decide not to alter the menu to preserve the reputation her classes are known for, she said.

Planning for the future with AI assistance

Both solopreneurs have also used AI as a thinking partner to grow their businesses in ways they said they couldn't have managed alone.

For Underwood, that meant turning a viral moment into a new revenue stream. When an Instagram Reel she posted generated 30 DMs in a single day, she knew she'd hit on something, but wasn't sure how to organize her ideas. "It helped me very strategically sort of plan the framework for what I already had in my brain — putting it out in a written form that I probably couldn't have done without it," she said. The result was the Family Table Reset, a six-month virtual program for parents that has since become a core part of her business.

Bhasin said that with AI's recipe brainstorming support, she anticipates having enough ideas to teach two new recipes a week for the next 10 to 15 years.

Even after experiencing the benefits of generative AI in their businesses, both chefs said there are food-focused tasks that AI simply can't do: Developing, tasting, and teaching delicious recipes.

"AI enhances what I do; it can never replace chefs," Bhasin said. "You need that human touch. You need my vibrant personality. You need that passion. And that only comes through when you've got a real person teaching you a class."