Q: What inspired you to start The Pickled Beet, and how did you come up with the name?
Chef Liz: Every experience I had prior to founding The Pickled Beet inspired me to find my purpose and create a service that enriches the lives of others. 

Growing up in an Italian Irish family, food has always been my epicenter. When I decided I wanted to step away from my executive corporate job more than 20 years ago, founding a personal chef company was a natural transition.

I initially named the company Lucia’s, after my great grandmother who inspired my love of cooking and taught me how using the freshest, highest-quality ingredients can transform even the most humble dish.

In 2017, I was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. I started working with a functional medicine practitioner and the first thing he did was change my diet. We eliminated gluten, dairy, soy, and any ingredient I had a sensitivity to, and the result was astounding.

Within weeks, I was feeling like my old self again and had more energy, growing back my hair, and experiencing more restful nights. I knew at this point that I had found a truly unique “medicine” that I wanted to share with others. 

In 2018, I hired a company to rebrand my corporation, and The Pickled Beet was born. They presented me with about 30 potential new names for the company. Most of them were typical personal chef company monikers such as The Healing Palate or Nourished Eats. The Pickled Beet was down at the bottom of the list, and it really stood out to me. I knew my vision for this organization was to create a unique culinary brand that encompasses so much more than personal chef services. We needed a name that is just as unique as we are. 

Our mission is to use food as medicine to help clients live their best life by nourishing their bodies with exactly what it needs while still preparing delicious meals that they can enjoy. Whether someone is healthy and wants to stay that way, or they have been diagnosed recently with a disease, or are struggling with food allergies or sensitivities, we can help. It starts with a unique weekly menu created for each and every client.

We do all the work, so they don’t have to. We create a profile for them and send them a proposed menu every week that is designed specifically for them to meet their individual or family preferences, dietary requirements, and health goals. Sometimes, we prepare multiple menus for a single family when individual members have a different eating style or dietary restrictions from a medical issue or food allergies.

Over the years, we have expanded from personalized weekly meals into additional areas of service: private chef experiences in the home for special occasions, catering for private flights and holidays.  

Q: Who would benefit from using your services?
Chef Liz: Anyone who enjoys delicious food, who is careful about the ingredients they put in their body, and who understands that eating well is an investment in their health. When you provide your body with the nourishment it needs, it can help you stay healthy, overcome an illness, put an autoimmune condition into remission, and ward off future medical maladies. 

It can help you fuel your body to keep up with the demands of work, family, and your personal goals. We cook for executives who are working long hours, families struggling with picky eaters and food allergies, professional athletes who know that eating right extends their careers, individuals flying on private jets who want a Michelin-star quality meal while traveling; individuals who want to celebrate a special occasion with a private chef experience in their home. 

I’m proud to say we have so many success stories using food as medicine. People who had terrible IBS before we cooked for them. Clients who had very bad autoimmune symptoms who now are experiencing relief. Cancer patients and their families, for whom proper nutrition is so critical and yet so difficult to achieve during treatment. 

All of our meals are scratch cooked using only organic poultry and produce, grass-fed beef, and wild caught seafood; items you will not find in most South Florida restaurants, meal prep companies, or caterers. Our chef team is very experienced; each having worked for more than 20 years in the culinary industry. 

Q: Can you walk us through a typical day as Founder / CEO of The Pickled Beet?
Chef Liz: My day starts at 7:30 with a review of emails, my calendar, and the day’s priorities. After I work for 90 minutes, I take a break to work out, hop in the red-light sauna, and meditate. I get back to work at 10:30 and I spend most of my time in meetings. I speak with potential clients about personalized weekly meals, private chef events in their home, or catering for private flights. I gather with my marketing/PR team to provide direction and plan our promotional efforts; I meet with various financial advisors to review, analyze, and forecast our numbers; I collaborate with local businesses on shared opportunities; and I huddle with my team to discuss the day's events and plans. 

Q: What advice would you give to women who want to start their own business?
Chef Liz: Secure Funding – It all starts with having enough money to launch your start up and sustain it before you start turning a profit. Traditional lenders are less likely to extend a loan or a line of credit to women business owners. You have to get creative – find local small business financial supporters such as a Community Development Foundation. 

Basic Business Education – If you don’t have a background in business, you’ll need to get help setting up your organization from a legal structure to licensing and insurance, to market research and defining your target audience, to finances. 

Persistence – It takes time for a newly launched business to find its footing. You have to stick with it during the slow start-up period. 

Courage – To grow a company, you have to be willing to spend money you don’t have yet based on the unshakable belief that “if you build it, they will come.”

Forward Thinking – The most successful companies are proactive and not reactive. That means planning ahead from a strategic, financial, and marketing perspective at least one quarter (and preferably longer) ahead of execution. 

Be Nimble – If Covid 19 taught us anything, it’s that the marketplace can change overnight. If buyer behavior changes, you have to adapt to survive. 

Q: Can you tell us how you manage your work life balance?
Chef Liz: I’ll be honest: for many years I didn’t. I worked 7-day weeks, 12–14-hour days, and I rarely took a vacation or a break. Once I hired a team who could manage the day-to-day operations, I was able to reduce my hours, stop working on weekends, and take long vacations without any connections to the office. Now, I try to keep my hours to about 30 a week. I protect my morning workout/meditation time. I no longer schedule meetings on Fridays. And I take regular breaks – several long weekends a year out of town and one or two longer vacations.  

Q: Where do you see your business five years from now?
Chef Liz: It's our mission to help as many people as possible live their best life through our services. Toward that end, we keep employing efforts to connect with others serving the same clientele. We keep adding to our referral partners of functional doctors, holistic nutritionists, and others who are working with clients who will benefit from using food as medicine. 

We’re working on rolling out some new offerings in 2026: culinary training sessions for private aviation flight attendants; a downloadable AIP diet program for individuals who need to follow an autoimmune dietary protocol; and overnight shipping for clients residing outside our state.

Q: What is one word of advice you can offer to young women who want to reach your level of success?
Chef Liz: Be patient. It takes time – and sometimes multiple tries – to build success. 

Q: Can you tell our audience one of your most memorable moments of your career?
Chef Liz: My first client was a professional baseball player, Doug Mientkiewicz. Doug caught the final out in the Boston Red Sox 2004 World Series win. I have been a life-long Red Sox fan, so it was surreal getting to know him. I really enjoyed cooking for him and his family. He used to sit at the kitchen counter while I cooked and regaled me with tales of his career. 

Q: At the start of your career, what do you wish you had known? 
Chef Liz: I wish I had known that owning a business is a 24/7 endeavor unless you set it up so that you can have more work/life balance. Thinking back on it now, I could probably have worked fewer hours, and we would have ultimately enjoyed the same level of success; it just would have taken longer.

Q: Which woman inspires you and why? 
Chef Liz: There are so many women I find inspiring. In the culinary industry, I am inspired by Alice Waters. She was instrumental in bringing the Slow Food movement to the US and her style of cooking emulates my own: celebrating each ingredient; focusing on locally grown, organic produce; and taking the time to enjoy a meal and eat with intention. I had the honor of meeting her this year at a dinner benefiting the Slow Food Miami organization.

Q: After high school, where did you feel your career path would take you?  
Chef Liz: In junior high, I became interested in journalism, so I went to Boston University to study communications and marketing. I spent the first 20 years of my work life in that field. 

Twenty-One Things About Chef Liz

1. What's your favorite family tradition? 
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I make many recipes that have been in my family for generations.

2. What celebrity would you like to meet at Starbucks for a cup of coffee? 
Ina Garten, but that would probably be at a bar with a martini.

3. What’s your favorite thing to do in your free time? 
Spend time on the water or walking in the woods.

4. What’s the most amazing adventure you’ve ever been on? 
I spent three weeks in Tahiti, and I swam with sharks, snorkeled with manta rays, and rode on a racing catamaran at sunset in Bora Bora. 

5. Among your friends, what are you best known for? 
My cooking!

6. Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever been? 
The catacombs in Rome.

7. What’s your favorite international food? 
Mediterranean dishes from Italy, Turkey, Greece.

8. Who is your favorite author? Stephen King. 
He came to speak at my college, and he told us fascinating stories about how he writes his books.

9. What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve done? 
Catch a last-minute flight to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. 

10. What’s your favorite quote or saying? 
“What would you do if you were not afraid to fail?”

11. If you unexpectedly won $10,000, what would you spend it on? 
A vacation. 

12. Are you a morning person or a night owl? 
Night owl.

13. Favorite City? 
Florence, Italy

14. Tell me about the best vacation you’ve ever taken.
When I was in my 30s, I planned to meet a friend in Greece for my first foray into Europe. I surprised my mom with a first-class ticket to join us. We visited Santorini, Naxos, Mykonos, Andros, and Athens. I could write a book detailing the crazy experiences we had. From the restaurant owner who invited us on his private yacht to the hotel owner on Andros who thought he would double-bill us by holding us hostage at his establishment.

15. What’s your big passion? 
Travel, feeding people, environmental conservation

16. What’s your signature drink? 
Margarita with freshly squeezed juice or a dirty martini

17. What is your favorite game or sport to watch and play? 
Football

18. Have you ever met anyone famous? Who? 
Lots of professional athletes and nearly every chef on the Food Network

19. Which of the five senses would you say is your strongest? 
Taste

20. If you could go back in time to change one thing, what would it be? 
Nothing. Every experience – good and bad – shaped me. 

21. What were you like in high school?  
Studious