Meet Our Chefs

Olivia’s love of cooking and baking was fostered by the matriarchs in her family. It began in her great-grandmother’s kitchen where she would frequently make chocolate chip cookies. Olivia’s mother, Denise, cooked every night at about the same time where the family would all meet around the dinner table. Olivia was shown a respect for the meal and the time taken to create it. In college, she would purchase magazines with how-tos for Halloween treats and Christmas goodies. In 2011, she began working at a local bakery and fell in love with the customer interaction and decorating cakes. Jodie claims the bakery is where Olivia “honed her decorating skills.” She later took a job at Cotton as a dessert chef, a position she wouldn’t leave until Crumbs was already six months along.

As a child, Jodie had always imagined a career in real estate or being a cook on TV. During Olivia’s bakery stint, Jodie took a different path to culinary school in Pittsburgh. After graduating from Louisiana Tech in Speech Communication, she had that dreaded “What do I do now” question, and her answer came from her husband who had just gotten a job in Pennsylvania. So she applied to the Art Institute and stayed in Pittsburgh for two years. Then the couple decided they missed home and returned to Louisiana. Though they were classmates at Cedar Creek School, Olivia and Jodie hadn’t seen each other in some time. And oddly, it had been Jodie who had suggested Olivia for Cotton, as she was the sous chef at Nonna at the same time. Both were working long hours and commuting to Monroe, and they both longed for something more family-oriented, where they would have entire creative control. And after some orchestrating by their intertwined families, a conversation at a mutual friend’s wedding turned into business cards with the name Crumbs Catering, suggested by Olivia.