Scoolinary brought Michelin-level culinary education to 400,000+ students

About Scoolinary

In 2019, Jordi Ber walked away from a 30 million euro exit. He had co-founded Habitissimo, an online marketplace connecting homeowners with tradespeople across Spain, grown it into a multi-country operation, and sold the final stake to UK-based HomeServe. He had an IESE MBA, an MIT engineering degree, and a growing portfolio of angel investments through his fund Ladrillos y Bits. He could have retired, advised startups from the sidelines, or taken a senior role at a company that needed his expertise. Instead, he started cooking.

Not literally. But when Jordi looked at the culinary education industry, he saw something that looked a lot like the home services market before Habitissimo: fragmented, expensive, and ripe for a technology-driven rethink. Traditional culinary schools cost tens of thousands of dollars and required physical attendance. YouTube had free content, but no structure, no credentials, and no community. There was no place where a line cook in Colombia could learn plating techniques from a Michelin-starred chef in Barcelona, earn a professional certificate, and connect with peers around the world. All at a price that did not require a second mortgage.

Jordi assembled a founding team that could execute at the level the opportunity demanded. He recruited Martin Caleau, his former Habitissimo co-founder, as Director of Technology. Maria Parareda joined as Director of Content. Vicente Fortea took over production. Lorena Hidalgo led marketing. With personal savings, $2.44 million in venture funding from Toubkal Partners, Bonsai Partners, Cabiedes and Partners, and 4Founders Capital, plus a Spanish government ENISA innovation loan, the team launched Scoolinary from Palma de Mallorca in June 2020.

As Jordi put it: “One isn’t born an entrepreneur but it’s something that can be learned. The creation of companies and jobs should generate wealth but also make a positive contribution to society.”

Challenges

Challenge 1: Professional culinary education was locked behind geography and price

Before Scoolinary, the path to professional culinary development ran through a small number of expensive institutions concentrated in major cities. A chef in Mexico City, a pastry student in Manila, or a restaurant owner in Nairobi who wanted to learn from the world’s best had two options: pay tens of thousands of dollars for a residential programme, or settle for unstructured YouTube videos with no accreditation and no feedback loop.

The gap was clear. High-quality culinary education existed, but it was reserved for those who could afford to relocate and pay premium tuition. The rest of the world’s hospitality professionals were left to learn by doing, by watching free videos of varying quality, or by not learning at all.

Jordi described the mission directly: “Scoolinary wants to democratize access to the best hospitality and catering training. We want to increase accessibility to the best professionals in the sector at the most affordable prices possible to help any professional in the sector to develop themselves and also grow their business.”

Challenge 2: COVID shut down kitchens worldwide and displaced millions

When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, it did not just close restaurants. It wiped out the primary learning environment for an entire industry. Chefs learn by working the line. Pastry cooks learn by producing hundreds of covers a night. When kitchens went dark, millions of hospitality professionals lost not only their income but their main channel for professional growth.

The timing of Scoolinary’s June 2020 launch was not accidental. Jordi saw a global workforce that was desperate to keep developing, had time on their hands, and needed affordable access to the kind of training that used to require a plane ticket and a tuition cheque. He described the project as “a purpose-driven, global, scalable project aimed at people accustomed to working with their hands.”

This was not a side project or a pandemic pivot. The founding team included a former co-founder from a successful exit. The venture funding was already secured. The content pipeline was being built with Michelin-starred chefs, not influencers. The platform choice had to match the scale of the ambition: hundreds of courses, thousands of lessons, video-heavy content delivery, community interaction, professional accreditation, native mobile apps, and the ability to grow from zero to hundreds of thousands of users without rebuilding from scratch.

“We are a purpose-based business. Our purpose is to transform people and connect cultures through gastronomy.”

Jordi Ber, Founder & CEO, Scoolinary

Solutions

Solution 1: BuddyBoss as the foundation for the world’s online culinary school

When you have built and exited a tech company for 30 million euros, you know what happens when you choose the wrong platform. You know the cost of migration, the pain of rebuilding, the risk of vendor dependency. Jordi’s team chose WordPress with BuddyBoss Platform, BuddyBoss Platform Pro, and BuddyBoss Theme as the foundation for Scoolinary’s community layer: user profiles, activity feeds, forums, groups, and messaging. LearnDash handled course structure, progress tracking, and lesson sequencing across what would grow to 400+ courses and 6,500+ individual lessons. WooCommerce powered subscriptions, payments, and checkout. Elementor handled page building and marketing pages.

This is the stack of a team that prioritized ownership and extensibility. Every component is under Scoolinary’s control. There is no revenue sharing with a platform. There is no algorithm deciding who sees their content. There is no risk that a SaaS provider changes their pricing or shuts down a feature. When the team wanted to build Scooly AI, an in-house tool that adapts recipes based on available ingredients and dietary restrictions, they built it on top of their existing stack. When they needed AI-powered subtitling and dubbing to expand from Spanish into English and other languages, they added it without waiting for a vendor’s product roadmap.

The result: Scoolinary went from launch to 400,000+ registered users without a platform migration, without a rebuild, and without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem.

Solution 2: Mobile-first delivery for chefs who learn between shifts

Professional chefs do not sit at desks. They learn on their phones during commute, between split shifts, in staff rooms before service. A platform that only worked on desktop would miss the reality of how the culinary industry actually operates.

The BuddyBoss App gave Scoolinary native mobile presence on both iOS and Android, white-labeled entirely under the Scoolinary brand. Users see “Scoolinary” in the App Store, not BuddyBoss. The app is listed under developer “Scoolinary S.L.” and is indistinguishable from a fully custom native build.

The numbers confirm the approach works. The iOS app, listed as “Scoolinary: Cook Online,” holds a 4.9-star rating with 102 ratings. The Android version has earned 4.7 stars across 566 reviews and surpassed 50,000 downloads. Features include resume-where-you-left-off playback, native chef profiles, and in-app purchases ranging from $47.99 to $269.99 for subscription tiers.

For a prospect evaluating whether BuddyBoss can deliver a premium branded mobile experience: this is a 4.9-star app with tens of thousands of downloads. Not a single user knows it runs on BuddyBoss.

Solution 3: Credibility through accreditation and world-class partnerships

A course platform is only as valuable as the credentials it confers. Scoolinary did not settle for being a content library. They pursued, and earned, institutional legitimacy.

Worldchefs, the World Association of Chefs’ Societies representing 10 million chefs across 110+ countries, named Scoolinary an Official Education Partner with accredited courses. The American Culinary Federation followed with their own course approvals. These are not vanity badges. They mean that Scoolinary courses count toward professional development and continuing education requirements for working chefs worldwide.

The instructor roster backs up the accreditation. More than 40 Michelin-starred chefs teach on the platform, representing over 50 Michelin stars in total. The faculty includes Antonio Bachour, twice named World’s Best Pastry Chef. Carme Ruscalleda, holder of seven Michelin stars. Jordi Roca and Quique Dacosta, each with three stars to their name. These are not testimonial endorsements. These chefs created structured, multi-lesson courses delivered through the platform.

Beyond the kitchen, Scoolinary earned B Corp certification with a score of 85.9, nearly double the qualifying median of 50.9. They joined 1% for the Planet and have provided scholarships to over 1,500 students and teachers through their education programme. They also launched ScoolinaryTV on Amazon Prime Video, with 24 courses adapted into series format for the Spain market.

Conclusion

Four years after launching from Palma de Mallorca, Scoolinary has become the largest and most sophisticated culinary education platform built on BuddyBoss. The numbers tell the story:

28,000 paying subscribers across 100+ countries. 400,000+ total platform users. 400+ courses with 6,500+ lessons and 550+ hours of video content. 2,000+ recipes in the course library. 50+ Michelin stars represented on the instructor roster. Worldchefs and ACF accreditation for professional development. B Corp certified with a score of 85.9. 4.9 stars on iOS, 4.7 on Android for the white-labeled BuddyBoss App. 675,000+ social media followers across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. 95%+ customer satisfaction rate. ScoolinaryTV on Amazon Prime Video with 24 culinary series. 1,500+ scholarship recipients through their education programme.

The community features powered by BuddyBoss are central to the experience. Students share dish photos and videos, participate in Scoolithon cooking challenges, and connect with fellow professionals across continents. For enterprise customers, the Teams plan enables restaurant groups and culinary schools to train staff under a single subscription with administrator dashboards and progress tracking.

The story comes back to ownership. Jordi Ber had the capital, the experience, and the engineering resources to build any platform he wanted. He chose BuddyBoss because it gave his team full control of their community, their course library, their mobile app, and their growth trajectory. No platform dependency. No revenue sharing. No algorithm controlling who sees their content. They did not just build a course library. They built the world’s online culinary school, on their own terms.

“We want a world that cooks better.”