Jessi Walter Brelsford

Founder and CEO of Taste Buds Kitchen

Jessi Walter Brelsford is the founder and chief executive of Taste Buds Kitchen, a culinary-entertainment brand that runs hands-on cooking classes, camps, birthday parties and corporate events for children, families and adults. The company began in New York City in 2007 and has franchised since 2013.^[1][2]

Franchise Times describes her as a Harvard graduate with a degree in economics, a former Division I swimmer and a former Wall Street executive who worked in New York for about seven years. She now lives in rural Maryland with her husband and three children.^[2]

A cupcake party in SoHo

The company's own telling starts with a cupcake-making birthday party Brelsford hosted in a friend's SoHo loft. Franchise Times adds that what began around 2007 as a passion project teaching children to cook became a business after she left her job during the Great Recession; she rented restaurant spaces to host classes before signing a lease for the brand's flagship kitchen in Chelsea in 2010.^[1][2]

Choosing franchising

Brelsford began franchising in 2013 after receiving repeated inquiries, and the first franchised kitchen opened in North Andover, Massachusetts, in 2015. She has said she preferred partnering with like-minded owners around the country to building a large corporate footprint of her own. For several years she did not push franchise sales hard; Franchise Times reported that she later revived growth with a more aggressive marketing approach.^[2]

During the COVID-19 pandemic the brand launched a free at-home cooking club that drew about 25,000 participants, and the company has since used that audience to market new studios by ZIP code. Brelsford has framed the brand's competition as the wider family-entertainment sector rather than other cooking schools.^[2]

Growth in 2025 and 2026

In August 2025 Franchise Times counted 14 units, with four more planned that year, more than 15 targeted for 2026 and a five-year goal of 200. By April 2026, an announcement from developer Comstock put the system at 18 locations nationwide with more in development, and the company's own location list now runs to about 20 studios, from Palo Alto and San Jose to Alpharetta, Winston-Salem, Providence and Chester, Maryland.^[2][3][1]

That April 2026 announcement also marked the brand's first studio in the Washington, D.C. region: a 2,600-square-foot kitchen at Loudoun Station in Ashburn, Virginia, led by local franchisee Teddra Burgess.^[3][4]

Why she ranks

Brelsford is on The Executive Review's Up & Coming list because Taste Buds Kitchen is a founder-led concept that has moved from a single New York kitchen to a national franchise in a category, culinary entertainment, that few franchisors occupy, and because its unit count is now climbing quickly after years of deliberately slow growth.^[2][3]

On the Top 100 Franchise Owners

Jessi Walter Brelsford is No. 88 on The Executive Review's Top 100 Franchise Owners 2026, in the Up & Coming band (Nos. 80–100) reserved for founders of smaller, fast-growing franchise brands. The ranking is editorial and independent; placement is never sold. View the full list.