Scerena Thompson, founder of The Empowered Oven.
I don't hide my disabilities anymore. I've learned to build around them instead. I've been a Culinary and Pastry Chef for 30 years — trained the old-school way, by chefs who built and ran their own restaurants, who taught me that cooking is never just about food. It's how people come together.
I live with ADHD, insomnia, trauma and dyslexia. My brain processes things differently to what most workplaces are built for — not incapably, just differently, and needing a bit more time and a bit less rigidity than the standard kitchen offers. That difference has cost me jobs more than once.
In 2025, after losing another position, my health gave out. I spent a month in hospital. I came out with a diagnosis of coeliac disease and a kitchen full of ingredients I could no longer eat.
Everything gluten-free I tried tasted like cardboard. So I did what I've always done when something isn't good enough: I went back to the bench. Testing, failing, adjusting, testing again. It took five months of alternative flours and failed loaves before I had a bread I was genuinely proud of.
By June, I was trading at markets — and customers couldn't tell my gluten-free bakes from traditional ones. That's when I understood what I was actually building.
Because this was never only about bread. My son lives with six disabilities. Under standard supported employment, his earning potential sits between $3 and $10 an hour, capped at eight hours a week. That's not a wage. That's not a life.
So I built the alternative: a bakery and catering business where every single team member has a disability, is paid properly, and is trusted to do real, skilled work — not handed a token task. Not charity. Employment, done properly, by someone who knows exactly what it's like to be underestimated.
The Empowered Oven is proof that gluten-free doesn't mean compromise, and that a disability doesn't mean limited potential. Every recipe is built from scratch, using real technique from three decades in professional kitchens, and blind-tested by our own gluten-intolerant customers before it ever goes on sale.