Jessica Wang is an artist, trained pastry chef and full-time pickler. An advocate for local produce, she's a beloved Los Angeles fermentation educator who also is the founder of an online Chinese and Taiwanese market, Gu Grocery.
The daughter of Chinese parents from Taiwan who met in the U.S., a lot of Jessica’s inspiration comes from her mixed heritage and culinary roots. Jessica grew up eating traditional fermented foods, but only fully embraced the power of pickling after being diagnosed with pre-diabetes, which saw her replacing pies with kimchi. She left her restaurant job to focus on other aspects of the food industry, including food styling, recipe testing, and working as a pastry chef.
Her micro-bakery venture, Pique-Nique, helped make her a popular name across L.A., and her mochi was legendary, but she pivoted and turned that business into Gu Grocery to inspire more people to eat fresh and eat local.
As a volunteer with Food Roots, the Asian Pacific Islander Forward Movement’s CSA program, she started teaching her first pickling workshop and hasn’t looked back since. Today, her educational fermentation workshop, Picklé, helps spread the joys of pickling and fermenting to a growing audience.
