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This paper aims to demystify the creative experiences of an extraordinary group of pastry chefs – The Malaysian World Pastry Team, champions of the 2019 World Pastry Cup. The authors adopted an expressionist theoretical lens informed by two aesthetic philosophers – John Dewey and Wassily Kandinsky.

A two-year portraiture was conducted – a qualitative methodology that draws features from phenomenology and narrative inquiry, rendering artistically and empirically written “portraits” that reflect themes and patterns of participants’ experiences. In-depth interviews, observations and material artifacts were collected amid a journey alongside nine extraordinary Malaysian pastry chefs.

Presented in story structures, the authors offer three “portraits” of culinary creativity, each representing a core essence of the creative phenomenon: creative harmony in the form of sensorial and symbolic poetry; imaginative episodes as a hypnotic state of inspiration and incubation; and the creative duality of scientific rationalism and artistic fashion. The authors delineated the intricacies of each theme by presenting them as individual narratives.

The portraits indicated that culinary creativity reflects an organic and emancipating aesthetic experience that is unbounded by formative structures or sequential processes. This provides a novel theoretical view that moves beyond conventional studies’ capitalistic frameworks, and toward the intimate viewpoints of the chef-creators. Specific contributions are discussed.

Through a unique qualitative approach and an aesthetic theoretical framework, this study provided a novel perspective on the culinary creative process. The aesthetic view captures culinary creativity through the eyes of the creator, a viewpoint less considered, yet imperative to the culinary profession.

Informed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity and Chad Borkenhagen’s conceptualization of open source cooking, this study explored how a group of extraordinary pastry chef used Instagram to openly express creativity, disseminate knowledge and reveal culinary secrets. The subsequent impacts of such actions were also assessed.

A qualitatively driven mixed-method approach was conducted using a nested mixed-method design. A total of 2,456 Instagram posts were visually analyzed alongside a series of interviews with elite pastry chefs over a two-year period.

Analysis distilled three themes that delineated how elite pastry chefs express creativity and share knowledge mindfully, ethically and altruistically on Instagram. The findings also converged to form a new theoretical model, “systems view of culinary creative sharing,” which accounts for the multifaceted considerations of culinary knowledge sharing on social media.

Findings converged to form a systems view of culinary knowledge sharing. This is peculiarly useful for scholars who are interested in developing a greater understanding about “where and how” creative ideas and knowledge originate, disseminate and receive corroborations in the contemporary digital era.

This study highlighted that a new praxis of open sharing looms large in the culinary profession. This praxis symbolizes a movement away from the traditional mindset of safeguarding culinary secrets and toward a more transparent and open philosophy toward knowledge sharing in the culinary community.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interrelationships among coffeehouse brand experiences, customer satisfaction and perceived value in generating patrons’ repeat purchase intention.

The survey sample consisted of 379 coffeehouse patrons who visited an international chain coffeehouse in a metropolitan city of South Korea.

The results of the structural equation modeling revealed that a coffeehouse brand experience exerted a significant influence on customer satisfaction and perceived value. The repurchase intention was found to be a significant and positive function of customer satisfaction and perceived value. Moreover, the result of the metric invariance test demonstrated a significant moderating impact on the relationships between coffeehouse brand experiences and customer satisfaction, coffeehouse brand experiences and perceived value, and customer satisfaction and repurchase intention.

An examination of the moderating role of switching costs demonstrated that the relationships between coffeehouse brand experiences and customer satisfaction, between coffeehouse brand experiences and perceived value and between customer satisfaction and repurchase intention differed across switching costs groups. More specifically, the relationship strength was greater for the high group of switching costs than for the low group.

The present study provides coffeehouse management with a better understanding of the underlying mechanism of patrons’ repurchase decision generation process.