Culinary consultant to 18+ Canadian franchise locations, trainer of 68 female entrepreneurs since 2017, Sonal Panchal explains why leaving the kitchen was the most radical career decision she made.
GEM Global Entrepreneurship Monitor‘s 2024/2025 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report drew on data from 161,528 adults across 51 countries. It found that women are 47% more likely than men to close a business due to family or personal reasons. The reason was not business failure. It was not a shrinking market. It was life itself, children, household duties, the invisible labour that never appears on a résumé. These pressures made it impossible for many women to continue.
In October 2025 survey by Chief and The Harris Poll found that 52% of senior women leaders are now building portfolio careers, combining consulting, entrepreneurship, mentorship, and creative work. They are not stepping back. They are rebuilding on their own terms.
Entrepreneur and chef Sonal Panchal understood this long before the data confirmed it: family responsibilities force women to pause their dreams, not abandon them. She always dreamed of building a big brand. That vision stayed alive. But life kept intervening: family responsibilities, her children’s schooling, daily household duties, the expectation of being available around the clock for everyone else. She does not see those years as a failure. She sees them as a phase of learning and patience.
Chef Sonal grew up in Gujarat, India. There, the professional kitchen, especially the tandoor, the intensely hot clay oven at the heart of Indian cooking, was understood to belong to men. Women were not expected to enter it. She entered it anyway. Trained with a Diploma in Culinary Arts, Sonal refused to accept the boundaries others had drawn for her. The path was not straight. The timeline was not what she had imagined. But she kept moving.
“Family and society did not encourage me. Being told you’re ‘good for nothing’ beyond household duties, that became fuel. I carried the fear of failing both as a student and as a mother. But I chose to move forward anyway.” Chef Sonal explains.
She moved forward, and she built something from it. That operational clarity was years in the making. From July 2015 to July 2016, Chef Sonal served as Chef and Fondant Artist in the Food Production and Pastry Department of The Orchid Ecotel Hotel, a role that extended far beyond routine kitchen responsibilities. She functioned in a critical, non-interchangeable capacity, directly shaping operational efficiency, guest experience, and the hotel’s culinary reputation.
The same discipline later translated into public-facing work. Chef Sonal participated twice, on October 27 and November 12, 2020, as Chef and Bakery Artist in Amul’s live culinary show, “Simple HomeMade Recipes.” The programme launched in April 2020 and has since become one of the longest-running live cooking shows globally. Her appearances placed her among a select group of specialists. These were professionals trusted to represent India’s most recognised dairy brand in a live, unrehearsed setting.
Currently, in Toronto, she is designing the full kitchen structure, menu, and operational model for Call me @7, a new premium quick-service restaurant tied to Desi Road and Daal Roti, a Canadian restaurant group with 18 combined franchise locations. The first outlet opens in early 2026. Ten more franchise locations are planned over the following three years.
When Chef vs Fridge Season 3 aired on Zee Cafe and Zee 5, it drew the sharpest knives in Indian professional cooking. Sonal Panchal was among them, and when the competition ended in 2023, she stood in the top three. The show’s format leaves little room for rehearsal or recovery: chefs must construct dishes from mystery ingredients under strict time pressure, in front of cameras and judges. Finishing in the top tier was not a result of luck. It was a public confirmation of what her consulting clients already knew.
For years, Sonal has given her Sunday mornings, two hours, without charge, to train women in baking and cooking. The classes run in the name of her father’s charity, a detail she offers quietly, as though the continuity of his values through her work is explanation enough. She built her own curriculum, her own training modules, her own recipe manuals. To date, she has trained 68 students, all women, many facing economic hardship and domestic circumstances.
Her first student was a survivor of domestic violence. Financially dependent. Emotionally broken. She learned to bake. Today, she runs a home-based cake business and meets her own daily needs without asking anyone’s permission.
“Her journey is my biggest validation,” Chef Sonal says. “Proof that empowerment truly changes lives.”
This is the part worth sitting with. Not the world record. Not the Netflix documentary. Not the franchise contracts. The first student. Because what Sonal understood before the GEM researchers formalised it is that the most durable answer to why women close their businesses is not found in policy briefs or investment networks alone. It is found in one skilled woman sitting across from another on a Sunday morning and saying: Here is how this works, now you try. The GEM report calls, among its six recommendations, for mentorship and training to overcome barriers. Sonal has been providing exactly that, without institutional support or financial incentive, since 2017.
There is a tendency to frame women who step back from the front line of their professions as having sacrificed something. Sonal refuses that framing entirely. Leaving the pass, the service, the daily performance of physical presence in a kitchen, that was not a retreat. It was a reorganisation. Expertise, once built into a system, travels further than any individual ever could.
The QSR she now plans to open in the United States, pursuing a franchise model, is that deferred vision finally finding its timing. The 68 women she trained are, in a different register, the same thing: knowledge embedded in other people’s lives, producing results long after she has left the room.
Sonal builds what the industry’s myth of the irreplaceable chef never could. Every kitchen she leaves gets a manual. Every woman she teaches gets a business.
The GEM report asked why women close their businesses. Sonal has spent years answering a different question: how do you make sure they never have to? Every kitchen she enters, she leaves behind a manual. Every woman she teaches, she leaves behind a business.
