Recipe for success

Becky Nelson ’78, Le Gourmet Baking

A chance opportunity to hear Ina Garten speak at the Dallas Country Club ended up changing the trajectory of Becky Nelson’s career — she just didn’t know it at the time. She had focused on raising her family when she found herself emailing Garten for advice after that fateful fundraiser (it was 2003, and email addresses were still easy to find). “She advised that I get a well-rounded exposure to all the areas of the food industry,” explains Nelson.

She did — working part time at a local restaurant in various capacities. Fast forward to 2012 when Nelson launched her own cookie company using Garten’s shortbread recipe as her base. “What I ended up doing was taking that recipe and cutting them out thick, so it makes them more of a specialty item,” she says. “I topped it with a glaze, which became a canvas to personalize and make it a special treat.” She credits her salesman father as well as her marketing professors with preparing her for customer research. “It’s a strength of mine, and I serve it well,” she adds.

Tyrell Russell ’16, The Kookie Box

You could say that a service trip to Zambia with the George W. Bush Institute got Tyrell Russell where he is today. “I had never left the country,” says Russell. But that trip introduced the Hunt Scholar and biology major to international travel, leading him to teach English in China following his graduation. There, he launched cooking classes Tykoo Eats, his first foray into the food industry. “I discovered I could reach people through food,” he says.

Empowered by the know-how passed on to him by his grandparents, Russell decided to stick with cooking and baking once he returned stateside. Today, he owns and operates The Kookie Box — a cookie company that “puts a story behind flavor,” as Russell puts it. He promotes a new international flavor each month, such as stroopwafel, tiramisu or even sweet potato. But he hopes to provoke thought through his flavor profiles. His Black History Month cookie, double chocolate with blood orange and sea salt, was inspired by a line in the Black national anthem: “stony the road we trod.”

“It’s a very dark and textured cookie,” he says. “The blood orange jam seeping through with sea salt is a metaphor for tears. … I don’t want the cookie to make people feel sad, but I like the idea of a food making you feel something other than full.” A cookie podcast is next in the works, to continue the conversation about what people eat and why.

Lauryn Bodden ’14, S’noods

Soccer brought Lauryn Bodden to SMU instead of going to culinary school, as she had originally planned. But it was her summer internship in London where the communications major did a research project through Engaged Learning on global food systems for her honors thesis. “That pulled me back into food,” she says. After graduation, Bodden moved to New York City and ended up going to culinary school, after all — where she could marry her undergraduate knowledge with on-the-job training. “I felt like I was ready to do anything,” she adds.

And she has—Bodden sails with Sailing Collective charters in the spring and summer, cooking and learning new cultures and cuisines. She works in recipe development with food magazines; she plans multicourse menus for private chef clientele; and she works with brands to develop meals for clients. But right now, her main dish is S’noods, an “upcycled noodle snack meant to bring (together) different cuisines and cultures,” Bodden says. The end product is the result of her win on Netflix’s Snack vs. Chef in 2022. “There’s this whole world out there of different shapes and flavors,” she says. “It’s a way to travel through your taste buds.”