Clinton Robinson Jr.

So nice to meet you! First off, what’s your name? Tell our readers a bit about yourself—where you’re from originally and where you live now.

My name is Clinton Robinson Jr., and most people call me CeJay. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, with Belizean roots on my side of the family, and I still live here, off Slauson and Crenshaw in South LA. I spent fifteen years as a full-stack software developer before I started building my own thing. Today I am the founder of Chefry, a marketplace for local food in Los Angeles, where home cooks and chefs get their own page, their own menu and real checkout, and customers order ahead and pick up fresh. I bootstrapped it, I still write most of the code, and I still recruit cooks the old-fashioned way, by driving out, buying their food and introducing myself.

Tell us one thing you love about where you live now.

The best of this city is local. Some of the best food in LA never touches a restaurant. It comes out of somebody's kitchen down the block, made by a neighbor who learned it from their family, and if you know, you know. LA is really a hundred small communities doing their own thing at a world-class level, and the joy of living here is getting to move between them. Inglewood, Hawthorne, Long Beach, the Valley, they all cook differently, and I get to eat my way through it and call it work.

Tell us a little more about what your company does and how it started. How does it help your customers?

Chefry started with a baby shower. My wife and I were expecting our first child. I am from LA with Belizean roots, she is from LA with Ethiopian roots, and we wanted the food at that shower to mean something, the dishes our families grew up on, made the way they are supposed to be made. We could not find them. Not on any delivery app, not in a restaurant near us. The food existed. People were cooking it in kitchens all over the city. There was just no way to find them or order from them unless you already knew somebody. A few years later I was helping care for my grandmother, who is Belizean, and hit the same wall from the other side. That is when it clicked. The problem was never supply. LA has more talented home cooks, caterers and bakers than almost anywhere. They are just running real businesses out of Instagram DMs and Venmo screenshots.

So I built Chefry. Every cook gets a real page with their name on it, a real menu, and real checkout. Customers browse what is near them, pick a chef, pick their dishes, pay once in the app, and pick up fresh or have the chef deliver. For the cooks, menu orders carry zero commission. Sell a forty-dollar plate, keep forty dollars. Payouts are instant, so a cook can buy tomorrow's ingredients with today's sale. Customers pay a small five percent service fee at checkout, and every line is shown before they pay.

Today there are more than 200 local chefs and home cooks on Chefry across Los Angeles, including permitted home kitchens, which California now allows, listed with their permit information and a food safety complaint path so customers know exactly who they are buying from.

If someone wants to start a business, what advice would you give them?

Do the thing that does not scale first, every week, and let the software catch up. The most important work I do is not code. It is getting in my car, buying somebody's food, and talking to them about their business. Second, verify instead of assume. I once found out our chef signup had been quietly failing for people. Cooks were trying to join and the door was locked, and I did not know until I checked the data. Now I check the data before I trust my own product. And keep your bets small enough that you can kill the ones that do not work by Friday. Bootstrapping taught me that one.

What is one piece of feedback from a happy customer or client that you won't forget?

Two, and they came from both sides of the marketplace. A home cook who had just started taking orders through Chefry wrote me to say she liked how detailed everything was, down to the printable kitchen ticket that shows her exactly what the customer picked, with every spice level and option. She had been running her business out of DMs for years, and the thing she noticed first was that nothing got lost anymore. And a customer who placed a first order with one of our Indian home kitchens left a review that said it was hands down the best Indian food they had tried in Los Angeles, made with love. That is a neighbor finding a neighbor. That review is the whole reason the company exists.

Where do you see your company in the future?

Neighborhood by neighborhood across Los Angeles first, then the rest of California as more counties allow permitted home kitchens. I want Chefry to be the storefront every cook in this city starts with, the way a restaurant starts with a lease, except free, and on your phone the same day. I also want it to be the fairest way to buy local food. The money from a plate should go to the person who cooked it, and the tools a restaurant takes for granted, pre-orders, payouts, a kitchen ticket, a real customer list, should be in every home cook's hands.

What is the biggest misconception about your industry?

That a delivery app is good for the cook. Most of them take a big cut of every order and keep the customer relationship, so the cook does all the work and ends up with less money and no idea who their regulars are. The other misconception is that someone selling plates out of their kitchen on Sundays is not a real business. They are some of the most disciplined operators I have ever met. They just never had a storefront built for them.

What has been one of your biggest struggles building your business, and how did you deal with it?

Trust. I am asking somebody who has been selling plates out of their kitchen for years, who already has customers and a system that sort of works, to try something new from a founder they have never met. A lot of people said no, or said yes and never followed through, and both of those sting. I dealt with it by showing up in person, buying their food like any other customer, and being honest that we are early. Money was the other one. I applied to accelerators and got turned down, and I have lost more grants than I have won. Bootstrapping means every dollar I spend on this came from somewhere else in my life, so I make small bets and I kill the ones that do not work quickly. What keeps me going is simple. Every time somebody tells me they cannot find the food they grew up on, I know the problem is still there and still worth solving.

Who was your favorite music artist and athlete growing up?

Kid Cudi, Mr. Rager himself. His whole catalog is about fighting through and moving forward, whether that is your mental health, building something real in the physical world, or love. His music is motivating and honestly therapeutic. I keep going back through his albums, because life has a way of handing you the same lessons at different levels, and there is always a song that meets me where I am.

For athletes, it has to be Kobe Bryant. His drive and his passion for the game are things I have carried into everything I do. The way he carried himself stuck with me: when you win, don't overcelebrate, act like you have been there before. When you are hurting, don't let anybody see it, and keep working. He was strategic and intentional about everything, and that is exactly how I try to build Chefry.

Any shoutouts you want to make?

My wife. Chefry started at our baby shower, and she has been with me through every late night, every pivot, and every high and low since. None of this happens without her.

Where can our readers learn more about you and your company?

Chefry.io, and the Chefry app on the App Store and Google Play. Follow along on Instagram at @chefryio and on X at @Chefry_io. If you cook in Los Angeles and want your own page, or you just want to find the best plate in your neighborhood, write to support@chefry.io and I will answer.

Website: https://www.chefry.io

iPhone app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6752793902

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chefry.io

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefryio