About
DICED Culinary School
 

In a world where rising prices keep things out of reach for many, one thing should always be affordable: an education. That’s Chef Don Guthro’s recipe for life. His mission is to provide affordable culinary training as a gateway to a foodservice career.

His program is called Diverse Innovation in Culinary Educational Development, DICED for short. The Vancouver culinary school introduces students to the restaurant hospitality industry through cooking and kitchen techniques that translate into life skills.

DICED is a Community Contribution Corporation CCC business with a social purpose. Gordon Food Service supplies products for Guthro’s DICED restaurant, catering, meal delivery program and proprietary products. DICED profits help to off set the costs of operations of the DICED Culinary School.    

“I look at education very differently than most people. I think education should be something that is approachable in cost, not something you have to pay an arm and a leg to receive,” he said. 

Before the pandemic, classes were conducted in a brick-and-mortar location. Teaching now takes place via online modules and video-to-video evaluations between students, onsite chefs, and educators. The programs align with SkilledTrades BC requirements for Professional Cook Level 1 and Professional Cook Level 2. 

Completion of the 44week PC1 and PC2 program paves the way for students wishing to obtain their Red Seal. 

“We like to have the chefs they are employed with support them and bring them on for a 2½-year apprenticeship,” Guthro explained. “They can follow that path and get through their Red Seal education.” ​

The idea for an accessible culinary program started in 2010, when Guthro landed in British Columbia following nearly three decades as an accomplished chef, restaurant owner and consultant. Disillusioned that culinary schools prioritized revenue and sought international students who often left the country after training, he looked for a way to tap into homegrown talent—people with dreams but no means.

“I came from a home with a single mom and five kids on a farm in Southern Ontario. We were poor,” Guthro recalled. “I know there are a lot of individuals who get forgotten, don’t have the money or can’t find the funding to go to school.”

Guthro was the director of a prominent Lower Mainland Culinary and Hospitality Management school. It was during his tenure here, that he became increasingly disillusioned with the profit driven ways these schools are operated. His vision for an affordable school began to take shape when he connected with a homeless shelter in North Vancouver. He asked if he could use the food they received to develop an educational program. He and his students made meals that were served withing the shelter everyday.

Since then, it grew to two production kitchens that made 1,000 meals a day for at-risk and homeless people in Vancouver and Surrey. Guthro now focusses his full attention on the culinary school and the production DICED Knives ; a branch of the DICED brand.​

Where it all began

As a businessman, Guthro knows sometimes all people need is an opportunity. As a chef, Guthro knows perfect meals require kitchen choreography. Opportunity and dancing … two things he understand well.  

Once a teenage track star, Guthro’s legs earned him an educational opportunity at George Brown College in Ontario, where he did professional chef training. After college, he used his legs as a professional dancer with Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet.

“As an athlete, I knew I would need something when those days ended,” he said. “What I didn’t count on was a shattered kneecap that stopped my career overnight.”

As a second-level cook, he jumped right into the restaurant industry, working in Canada and then France and Italy before returning to North America. Austrian Chef Heinz Kattenfeld at Winnipeg’s Amici restaurant influenced Chef Don Guthro to focus on issues in the industry. Chef Guthro went back to school to study the financial and operational side of the business.

Making a culinary difference

So far, DICED has graduated over 740 students and conducted about 800,000 classroom hours. 

One student that stands out was a man in his mid-40s who came back to work with Guthro after graduating and working elsewhere for two years. After his coursework and on-the-job experience, the man achieved his goal of opening a small breakfast place—a tall order for many culinary-school graduates.

“We don’t want [students] to have huge debt when they finish school and go work in the industry, maybe for minimum wage, at first,” Guthro explained. “That’s very challenging for a lot of individuals, and there are culinary graduates who go somewhere else because they can’t afford to pay off that debt. What we want to try to do is have them employed.”

DICED Culinary School is making culinary careers accessible and affordable, while making a dent in the pervasive restaurant labour shortage. For Chef Guthro, that’s a dream realized.