Cooking Up Success with ‘Sticky Fingers’: Erin Fletter’s Inspiring Journey as a Mompreneur

With three young kids at home, a traditional 9-to-5 wasn’t in the cards for Erin Fletter — and yet being a mom hadn’t smothered her desire to work. In 2011, at her kitchen table, Fletcher and her dad, Joe Hall, co-founded Sticky Fingers Cooking, a culinary school offering enrichment cooking classes for kids.  

READ: Balancing Work and Motherhood — Strategies for Success in a Busy World

Fletter and her husband, Ryan, co-own Barolo Grill Restaurant in Cherry Creek, so a food-related pivot wasn’t totally unforeseen. “It was a typical entrepreneur story,” Fletter says, thinking back to the organization’s inception. “I went to about a hundred schools, and 97 said, ‘What are you talking about?’” But three Denver area schools gave Sticky Fingers a chance. “That snowballed into 30 schools, then 300 and 1,000,” Fletter says.  

The concept is simple: Chef-instructors lead small-group cooking classes centered around a plant-forward weekly recipe. Food is used as a jumping-off point for exploring new cultures. Students might learn about Mongolia, for example, while chopping bell peppers for fried rice. They’ll also study a featured ingredient — usually a vegetable, fruit or grain — and they might pick up some math, science and reading while honing their culinary skills.  

READ: Plant-based Protein is Taking Root in Colorado’s Food Economy

Business boomed. “We’ve always had a 99 percent retention rate,” Fletter notes. Then in March 2020, everything shut down. “The 1,000 schools we’re in closed; it was scary,” says Fletter. But the Sticky Fingers leadership team bound together, integrating Zoom into the organization’s proprietary software to launch online cooking classes.  

When inflation sparked a resurgence in home cooking, CEO Fletter and her team capitalized on that, too, reaching a younger generation through their TikTok and YouTube channels. Fletter started writing cookbooks, too, and Penguin Random House will release the fifth in a series, “Kid Smoothies: A Healthy Kids’ Cookbook,” this October. 

“That’s how we made lemonade out of lemons during Covid-19,” Fletter says. But there sure were a lot of lemons. “Women were so disproportionately impacted,” Fletter continues, noting that many women haven’t re-entered the workforce after stepping out to care for children and/or aging parents.  

READ: Surviving Food Inflation — How Colorado Restaurants Adapt to Rising Costs and Labor Challenges

Sticky Fingers is 90 percent women-led, and Fletter is passionate about bolstering female business owners. It’s this resolve that led her to explore a franchise model. “What’s great about franchising is that it’s a symbiotic relationship: Our success is their success, and vice versa,” she says. Since initiating a franchise brand in late 2022, Sticky Fingers has opened three territories in two states (Texas and Illinois). The company has retained its company-run headquarters in Denver and Boulder. “We’re in the game as well, running our cooking classes side-by-side with franchisees,” Fletter says. 

Jamie Siebrase is a freelance writer based in Colorado.