Culinary Director, Airline Lounges Segment East Coast at SodexoLive! (2024-01 – Present)
- Lead, coach, and develop Regional and Executive Chefs across a 25-unit lounge portfolio in 13 airports ($100+M annual revenue), overseeing three distinct lounge tiers
- Own culinary strategy including quarterly menu rotations, tastings, limited-time offers, and on-site brand partnership events
- Drive succession planning and quarterly talent reviews; ensure purchasing compliance (VDA and prime vendor targets) while managing location-specific food and labor budgets
- Standardize and implement enterprise culinary, safety, and quality assurance processes while advancing brand positioning through consistent, scalable food programs
- Identify and activate opportunities for portfolio growth through innovation workshops, performance audits, and CX-driven insights
- Continuously elevate service standards to maintain competitive differentiation through quarterly evaluations, audits, and corrective action plans aligned with client and brand expectations
- Develop enterprise standards, tools, and processes to deliver consistent culinary execution at scale
- Partner with operations leadership to ensure adoption and compliance with brand standards, systems, and procedures
- Collaborate with senior leadership to drive data-informed hospitality strategies rooted in guest feedback and performance metrics
- Design and execute high-impact client engagement events focused on long-term retention and strategic alignment
- Proactively identify operational risks and opportunities, delivering actionable recommendations and strategic solutions to executive leadership
Senior Director of Research & Development at Everytable (2021-11 – 2023-12)
- Manage team of 2 R&D Chefs to achieve department and company goals inclusive of new product development and optimization while reducing production COGS by 21%
- Maintain R&D budget and test kitchen
- Ensure product briefs are executed according to approved outline and stage gates, inclusive of attaining targets for nutrition, operational constraints, and any other guardrails identified
- Reduced overall WIP and ingredient count by 15% while maintaining a 6-week menu cycle
- Guide and support culinary team in the implementation and adherence of brand standards, processes & systems
- Brought all 195 in-house ingredients up to current clean label compliance standards
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to commercialize on-trend, market driven skus to USDA compliance standards
Director of Culinary Innovation and Commercialization at Eat Club (2015-11 – 2020-07)
- Create a pipeline of gold standard prototypes for early idea screening to consumers, focus groups and internal analysis
- Increased catalogue breadth from 200 skus to over 1500
- Drive ideas and solutions for future scalability and multi-market replication
- Create, implement, and ensure Culinary SOPs are being followed in the areas of food safety, food storage, prep recipes, production line procedures and all other culinary processes
- Lead culinary training in NYC commissary producing 50,000 meals per week
- Lead production and assembly training in CA commissary of 80 associates
- Lead and drive Production management across multiple facilities to obtain and maintain department Customer Satisfaction and Quality Enhancement levels at or above designated scores
- Shepherd all R&D products through development and commercialization process across all brands and product formats
- Launched to market over 1300 4*/5 skus
- Source products, ingredients and suppliers that fall in line with brand standards
- Negotiate with vendors to ensure best pricing/volume purchases while building and maintaining strong, positive vendor relations
- Conducted on-boarding of supply chain, restaurant and commissary partners
Multi-Unit Corporate Chef at Garces Restaurant Group (2010-02 – 2015-10)
- Drive culinary vision and establish operational methodology
- Lead culinary team in the development and administration of menu management and supported the seasonal menu development and implementation for all operations while maintaining an average of 27% food cost across all concepts
- Provided culinary leadership and expertise to cookbook-related R&D, photo shoots and television programs
- Oversaw kitchen build outs/renovations and all pre-op training for both FOH/BOH
- Provided boots-on-the-ground support and coaching during early opening stages
- Design and implement budget plans for concurrent large-scale projects to support rapid growth across multiple regions
- Provided ongoing BOH training, feedback and support within the company's diverse concepts (22 stores plus catering) in the areas of food quality and innovation, culinary financial oversight, purchasing, inventory controls and sanitation
- 23 CDC and almost 70 sous chef direct reports
