Grace Parazo: CEO of The Bailiwick Academy

It’s only a matter of time before one starts to figure out their life’s puzzle pieces and see the big picture of what they are truly meant to do in life. For Grace Parazo, the CEO of The Bailiwick Academy, it took years of realizations, career experience, and frustration to finally be able to grasp the idea that she was meant for something else.

Before founding The Bailiwick Academy, Marie Grace Parazo worked graveyard shifts in the BPO industry, where she found not only her future husband but also a gap between culinary instructors and students. During this time, Grace got married and had children, eventually discovering baking and cooking as a hobby.

Grace was not only an employee, a wife, a mom, and a hobbyist—she was also a breadwinner to her aging parents. For an extra income, she decided to build a home-based business, called Viriado Cakes & Pastries, which specialized in customized cakes and cupcakes. To enhance her skills, she started attending different culinary classes at Heny Sison Culinary School and International School for Culinary Arts and Hotel Management (ISCAHM).

In an interview with Bilyonaryo News Channel (BNC) in 2025, Grace shared that the trigger for entering entrepreneurship was when her mother was hospitalized, which caused exhaustion financially, mentally, and physically. This was when she thought she was not going to let her kids experience what she went through. “I promised myself I won’t use my kids as a retirement plan,” she shared.

During the same period of their lives, Grace and her husband realized their jobs would not last as long as they lived, refusing to be complacent and dependent on jobs that barely kept them stable.

This was the point when the “puzzle pieces” began to slowly complete themselves—financial struggles, the cooking hobby, and the refusal to be stuck—all led to the birth of The Bailiwick Academy.

The History of The Bailiwick Academy

The Bailiwick Academy is an online learning platform for baking and cooking, where students get to learn culinary skills and techniques from professional chefs all over the globe.

The platform was founded in January 2018, the couple spending all ₱400,000 savings from their bank account and the faith they had in themselves to turn their lives around as capital. Grace entered the industry after realizing the gap between culinary educators and students during her classes at Heny Sison Culinary School and ISCAHM, observing how much the students rushed to arrive on time and the little bit of questions from the lesson they never got to ask because they never saw the instructor again after leaving the room.

To solve this problem was Grace’s target. She wanted to create a space where culinary students and instructors met halfway without any compromise.

While building the website, Grace began cold emailing the chefs she knew from the classes she used to attend. Her pitch was convincing, that both would benefit from the partnership: business growth for Grace and passive income for the instructors.

However, she recalled receiving rejections for four months straight, until one chef, Jimbo de Panadero, finally agreed.

“That first ‘yes’ meant everything,” Grace stated.

Chef Jimbo has worked with top food brands in the Philippines, having more than 30 years of experience in the baking industry. He started teaching in 1997 as a technical baking demonstrator and a technical baking consultant since 2000. You can say that “yes” really was big, because it was from a master chef.

What might seem funny is that this happened way before the operations were ready. On the day of the shoot, Chef Jimbo asked her, “Where’s our studio?” to which she replied, “Nothing,” laughing as she recalled it in the same interview with BNC. From there, other chefs followed and started joining the platform.

Even in post-shoot aspects, Grace and her husband handled it all, sharing that they learned video editing using that one laptop they had years ago just so they could come up with initial outputs.

After a year, Grace earned her first million in revenue. She shared, “That was when I felt, ‘Okay, we’re doing something meaningful. Let’s continue.”
Since then, you could say Grace was successful in solving the gap she saw from a few years back, because flexibility became the strength of The Bailiwick Academy.

What’s Good About The Bailiwick Academy?

By enrolling in a class, you get lifetime access to the prerecorded class and a downloadable workbook containing the recipe. This means that the class is all yours to go back to if you ever miss something.

Another feature of The Bailiwick Academy is that its classes have an assigned forum where enrolled students and the respective instructor can communicate. The forum is open at any time after the class is purchased. This means that they remain guided for as long as they are on the platform.

Users from different social media platforms have happily shared that the chef instructors on the platform are highly accommodative to their questions, unlike free-to-use platforms and even other paid ones.

The platform is also quite friendly to those who want to verify the quality of the classes first before committing to paid ones, as it offers over 30 free culinary classes you can enroll in immediately after signing up. The Bailiwick Academy teaches over 200 classes online. Although specializing in baking and cooking, they offer programs in lifestyle, art, business, and technology as well. Some of them include Basic Flower Arrangement, Excel Essentials, Mobile Food Photography, and more. What makes The Bailiwick Academy superior is that it gathers talented chefs and instructors from around the world, including highly acclaimed individuals with the biggest names in the culinary world, such as Chef Him Uy De Baron, Chef Miko Aspiras, Chef Jimbo de Panadero, and Valeri Valeriano and Christina Ong of Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes.

Grace shared that she was able to gather these chefs as she personally knew some of them from the classes she used to attend. This is a huge plus, having firsthand experience with the people she was onboarding.

Today, the school has grown to have more than 30 instructors, including chefs based abroad. The academy has a dual mission that does not just teach cooking or baking, but also empowers students to build food businesses. Around 40% of students use their training to start side hustles or open full-time bakeries, while others apply it for personal use for their families.

Grace to New Entrepreneurs: Patience.

Looking back, Grace took everything left in their savings, took a leap of faith, and ran with it in hopes that they would find success in what they believed had potential.

Almost nine years later, The Bailiwick Academy stands at over 6,000 students worldwide, holding the title as the Philippines’ first-ever online learning platform for cooking and baking.

In a feature by theAsianParent, Grace stated, "Ako talaga, kung gusto ninyo talaga ‘yung ginagawa ninyo, just go for it. Huwag na kayong magdalawang-isip kasi there's really no perfect timing talaga. Malalaman mo lang na kaya mo kapag na-try mo na,” emphasizing that no one has to start perfect.

She also shared the reason she named the platform “Bailiwick.”

“Bailiwick means expertise. And that’s what we do. We invite experts in the industry to teach on our platform.”

Even several years later, The Bailiwick Academy remains the top school for such an industry despite acquiring multiple competitors over the years. Grace said, “I think what really stood out was [that] we didn’t really leave our students behind.

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