If you've ever found preparing a meal tiresome, mundane and tedious, then a new online application by one budding Ballarat chef might be the answer to your problems.
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Amaze App, which is still in its early stages and hopes to launch this August, aims to provide patrons with a unique and incomparable dining experience, connecting customers with a private chef in their local area.
The idea is the brainchild of Ballarat-born and now Melbourne-based chef Justin Summersgill, who said Amaze's inception was more than 10 years in the making.
He said the app drew on his experiences navigating the hospitality scene as an upcoming chef as well as the plight many workers including himself faced when it came to finding a trustworthy employer and secure wages.
"Being a chef is a very underpaid job at the best of times and a lot of people end up getting underpaid in the hospitality sector," Mr Summersgill said.
"During my time as a chef I've had over 50 per cent of my employers underpay me and the instances are usually around me not being paid for the overtime I've done.
"I found it difficult to speak up and I usually left without speaking out because I realised as a chef and as a person I was worth more than this."
He said Amaze would address wage discrepancies chefs and hospitality workers endured through giving chefs the autonomy to set their own rates.
"Chefs usually get paid an hourly rate but with our app they'll get paid for their event and so this way they'll be able to set their own price," Mr Summersgill said.
"For example, the award rate for a chef is about $29 and that is if they're paid properly but when I run events I can earn anywhere between $50 to $100 an hour.
"This will result in chefs definitely being paid a better and it would also lessen the stress chefs often encounter."
Like many of us who change between multiple careers in our lifetime, being a chef was not always in Mr Summersgill's sight.
He said it was a sense of disengagement during his first year of university doing a Bachelor of Animal Veterinary and Bioscience immediately after high school, which made him change his future trajectory.
"At school I was quite a high achiever and when I moved onto university I found that it was more or less the same as (my degree) because it didn't really challenge me," Mr Summersgill said.
It was in Tasmania the sparks of Amaze ignited. He said he seized the opportunity to start offering his expertise as a chef privately as very few people were providing this service.
"No one really had private chefs come to small dinner parties and that's what started the initial workings of my business and now app," Mr Summersgill said.
As for the demand for private chefs in Ballarat, he said there was a strong appetite, having already serviced more than 15 people in the area.
"We do have quite a bit of demand for private chefs especially for romantic dinners and comparing the demand I have here in Ballarat with Melbourne, I actually have done more romantic dinners here than in Melbourne," he said.
Looking to the future, Mr Summersgill hopes to diversify the range of contractors his app has available.
"We're hoping to get bartenders and musicians on board to help add to the experience," he said.
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