We recently connected with Cricket Azima and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cricket, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I founded The Creative Kitchen as a kids cooking school that taught healthful recipes, focusing on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. We hosted huge festivals (Kids Foo Festival) teaching families how to eat a balanced diet, through fun and engaging activities.

During the pandemic, I noticed an exponential increase in requests for my edible slime and candy sushi virtual classes, and realized the transformative power of special experiences and occasional indulgences, especially during challenging times. I envisioned Cricket’s Candy Creations as a place where the eye-sparkling joy I saw in her students would be accessible to all kids and the young at heart. At CCC, Cricket invites creators to step out of their routines and experience the freedom to break all the rules: make a mess, eat candy, and play with their food!

“During the pandemic, kids have missed out on play dates, birthday parties and other occasional indulgences of childhood,” says Cricket. “They’ve been craving these special experiences, which have real educational, emotional and developmental significance. That’s what Cricket’s Candy Creations is all about. I wanted to provide a space for kids – and the young at heart — to let loose, explore, engage, create and of course eat!”

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Cricket Azima

Founder and Big Cheese of The Creative Kitchen, Cricket’s Candy Creations, and Kids Food Festival
Cricket Azima is a dynamic professional chef who specializes in cooking for and with children. Cricket works with a variety of food companies, offering a range of services, including spokesperson work, recipe development and testing, freelance writing, teaching, family outreach, blogging (as part of the Cooking Light Blogger’s Connection), creating webisodes, special events, and innovation consulting. She has worked with Whole Foods Market, Foodnetwork.com, Organic Valley, Happy Family, and General Mills, to name a few. Cricket’s children’s cookbook, Everybody Eats Lunch, was published by Glitterati Inc., in May, 2008. In 2014, Cricket’s classroom cooking curricula, Everybody Can Cook, was published by DRL Books. In 2016, Cricket coauthored The Happy Family Organic Superfoods Cookbook for Baby & Toddler.
Cricket’s latest venture is Cricket’s Candy Creations, a multi-sensory experience where creators of all ages can craft edible candy art while immersed in candy-themed activities designed to be a unique outlet for exploration, visualization, creativity and fun. The flagship for Cricket’s Candy Creations is a 12,000 square foot location at 200 Hudson Street in New York City. Cricket’s Candy Creations invites families and food lovers to step out of their routines and into an unforgettable hands-on crafting experience where they can let their imaginations go wild and create wacky edible art out of candy. More information can be found at cricketscandy.com. Cricket’s Candy Creations has plans to expand into additional cities, as well as grow a candy crafting product line and digital content.

Since 1999, Cricket has been teaching cooking classes to children of all ages at various locations in New York City. Cricket wrote her master’s thesis on the benefits of teaching cooking to children, which led her to launch The Creative Kitchen in 2003 (www.thecreativekitchen.com). The Creative Kitchen hosts hands-on children cooking classes and events at venues such as schools, Whole Foods Market, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Macy’s. In addition, the company produces family food events for corporate functions, movie premiers, and other such large-scale activations.

Cricket is a one of a kind instructor. She strives to teach more than just a recipe or basic cooking technique, with a teaching philosophy that is based on the educational benefits of cooking. Cricket believes that cooking is a multi-faceted learning opportunity. Her method of food education is designed to inspire children to learn and express themselves creatively in the kitchen classroom, while reinforcing traditional learning disciplines. With this in mind, her classes incorporate a wide range of subjects: history, geography, math, reading, social studies, nutrition, science, foreign language, and art all find a place in her kitchen.

Drawing on these food education philosophies, Cricket developed Everybody Can Cook, a comprehensive children’s cooking curricula and teaching program. The book’s unique format provides turnkey lesson plans, featuring tips and tools to integrate traditional school subjects, and includes adaptations for various physical and developmental abilities, dietary needs, ages, and environments.
In 2012, Cricket founded the Kids Food Festival (www.kidsfoodfestival.com), a celebration to educate families on how to make balanced food choices. The annual weekend of events serves as an effort to prevent childhood obesity through fun programming and entertainment. The NYC event hosts about 40,000 attendees, and the Los Angeles weekend of events hosts approximately 6,000. The Kids Food Festival partners with the James Beard Foundation, the American Heart Association, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, and the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation. In 2017, the Kids Food Festival partnered with the Association of Children’s Museums to produce the Kids Food Festival To-Go, a series of mini 1-day Kids Food Festivals hosted in children’s museums across the country.

Cricket acted as a contributor to iVillage, an online content-driven community for women. Cricket advised as the Family and Children’s Editor for The Nibble, an online magazine about specialty foods. She served as the Food Editor of KIWI Magazine, a family magazine focused on healthy and organic living, and was also the Director of Kids’ Programs for Kidfresh, an innovative company in New York City offering all natural, freshly prepared foods for kids.

Cricket is a graduate of Boston University (BA in Communications), New York University (MA in Food Studies & Food Management), and Peter Kump’s New York Culinary School (now, The Institute of Culinary Education; professional culinary degree). Following graduation, she served as a professor of food studies and an academic advisor at NYU. Cricket is a member of the Board of the American Heart Association Go Red for Women Committee, the NYC Autism Charter School and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan Food & Nutrition Advisory Board.

Cricket lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband and two children.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I like to give members of my team aspects of the business/operations to “own.” I feel strongly that people are more driven and vested in their productivity when they have ownership of whole aspects of the business – that then come together, as a team, to provide an outstanding collective. And with my team basically consisting of all young women – I sincerely enjoy mentoring and advising that demographic.

Also – I believe it’s extremely important to show the team that I can, have, and will continue to actively participate in all aspects of the company – from sweeping the floors and washing the edible slime bowls to leading tours and birthday parties, and more! We are a small operation and we need to come together as a team to provide the best service we can possibly offer to the candy creators…which is extremely important to me, especially considering my name is literally on the door :)

Have you ever had to pivot?

The Creative Kitchen’s kids cooking classes and large format Kids Food Festival were both put at risk during the pandemic as schools were not in session – and even when they did go back to meeting in person – food/cooking classes (or even outside vendors in general) were not welcomed. Separately, our large format Kids Food Festival was put on hold as food companies froze their marketing budgets and held off on activations for similar reasons.

The pivot from healthful cooking to candy was a big one for me. And while I bring SO much joy to kids through the candy crafts – I miss literally changing lives by introducing kids to and getting them to incorporate more vegetables into their diet through our cooking classes.

That said – seems like very soon I will have my cake and eat it too as we are starting to pick back up many of our cooking classes and have both candy crafting and healthful cooking classes on the weekly calendar – yay!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cricketscandy.com
• Instagram: @cricketscandy
• Facebook: Cricket Azima – The Creative Kitchen
• Linkedin: Cricket Azima

Image Credits
Ghazalle Badiozamani