Meet Chef Maria

Your Role In Our Story

Because you're building a workplace that cares. At Beyond Decadence, our mission is to help organizations create inclusive, compassionate workplaces through innovative, story-driven experiences. We design meaningful moments that spark connection, foster growth, and celebrate belonging. At Beyond Decadence, everyone has a seat at the table.

From IT Professional to Pastry Chef to Caregiver Advocate

Chef Maria Kemp’s journey began in her mother’s kitchen, where a childhood passion for baking took root. After earning a degree in Business Administration and spending nearly 20 years in IT, a friendly baking competition rekindled her culinary aspirations. This led her to Chicago's prestigious French Pastry School, where she earned her L'Art de la Pâtisserie certificate, commuting over 224 times by train to fulfill her dream. Immediately after, she launched Decadence Bakery and Pastries as a storefront in Normal, Illinois.

A New Chapter: Beyond Decadence

Two years into her successful venture, Chef Maria’s mother suffered a stroke. Without hesitation, she closed the bakery and promised her mother that she wouldn’t abandon her during what would become four nursing home transitions. Five years later, she quietly reintroduced her business under a new name: Beyond Decadence while keeping her promise and visiting her mother regularly, offering love and support through every challenge. She kept that promise for six years, seven months, and one day. "Little Mama" earned her wings on the ninth anniversary of Chef Maria’s graduation from pastry school.

After relocating to North Carolina, Chef Maria introduced Beyond Decadence as a pop-up bakery serving Lake Norman and Charlotte clientele. Adapting through the pandemic, the business morphed away from dessert catering and nationwide shipping to DEI dessert experiences, team-building experiences, and speaking engagements, combining her passion for pastry and diversity.

If you’ve known Chef Maria for a while, you remember her as the chef behind Beyond Decadence. For those who are newer, you may be wondering why a pastry chef is now speaking about caregiver advocacy. The answer is simple: life. For more than 8.5 years, she was the primary caregiver for both of her parents while managing her career. That experience revealed the hidden struggles of employee caregivers, people balancing work and family responsibilities in silence, often without support.

Today, she brings those lessons to HR, DEI, Wellness, and Benefits leaders, ERGs, and event planners who are all looking for engaging, impactful content for their leaders, employee caregivers, or conference attendees. As a workplace wellness speaker focusing on caregiver advocacy, she draws on her pastry background to make complex challenges memorable. Sometimes that means real desserts that spark interaction. Other times it means dessert analogies that transform lessons into stories people carry with them. For organizations, that translates into stronger retention, empathy-driven leadership, and cultures that reduce burnout.

Twice A Caregiver: It Changed Everything

Six years later, she honored a similar promise to her father when he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and late-stage Alzheimer’s. Affectionately known as “Papa Kemp,” he became a beloved figure on Chef Maria’s social media as she shared heartwarming moments from their caregiving journey. Papa Kemp graduated to be with Jesus on July 4, 2023.

These sacred caregiving experiences were not just personal. They were transformational. They inspired Chef Maria to reimagine her business, giving rise to Beyond Decadence as a platform for caregiver advocacy.

One Bold Mission

Although Beyond Decadence was originally founded as a baking business, today it has transformed into a platform for caregiver advocacy and workplace wellness. Desserts are no longer offered as catering but are now used strategically: as interactive tasting experiences or as analogies to make workplace challenges easier to grasp and harder to forget. Chef Maria draws on her background as a French-trained pastry chef, weaving in dessert analogies as a teaching tool to make caregiving challenges relatable and memorable. While they may not fit every delivery format, they are never intended as catering or orders.

She now offers a unique experience to help organizations build compassionate, inclusive cultures:

• Services to Support Employees Who Are Caregivers: Speaking engagements and trainings drawn from Chef Maria’s personal journey. She equips companies to better support employees caring for children, loved ones with disabilities, aging parents, or navigating the sandwich generation. The result: greater resiliency, empathy, and stronger retention.
  

The name Beyond Decadence still fits because it is not just about desserts, but about going beyond what is expected to create meaningful change in workplaces.