A little background
I grew up inside commercial food production, trained under a Parisian-trained pastry chef, and have spent three decades building the systems — menus, staffing, brand, technology, and the financial and operational backbone — that let food businesses run at scale without losing what makes them good.
Uitsmijter — a classic Dutch breakfast, taught to me by my friend Mollie
What I bring to the table
A little of what I've built and led, in case any of it is useful to you.
Brand & Digital Systems
Design and manage full digital infrastructure — ecommerce, wholesale portals, and brand systems — for growing ventures.
Built a record label's platform to serve as both a 50-year archive and a direct-sales engine, driving exponential growth in streaming revenue. Built an apparel company's full ecommerce and wholesale stack from the ground up.
Currently manage hosting and security across 9 production sites.
Recipe & Menu Development
Built a 430-dish menu system, compound-searchable by season, cuisine, and dietary restriction at once — engineered to serve highly distinct markets without compromising quality or turnaround.
I built it to solve my own problem first: as the person handling contracting, sales, and price negotiation, I was losing hours per client pulling menus together by hand. It became a tool my clients could search directly too — "Italian, seasonal fall produce, gluten-free" — and I've kept building tools like it ever since.
Delivered tailored menus across nonprofit fundraisers, high-end donor cultivation, union events, and weddings — each calibrated to its audience rather than a single house style.
Finished dishes close to service time rather than a day in advance, avoiding the quality drop-off most catering operations accept as standard.
Events & F&B at Scale
Scaled events from 200 to 4,500 guests, repeatedly, with lean staffing and full scratch-cooking — a standing capability, not a one-time feat.
Standard practice includes adapting to unfamiliar kitchens and untested infrastructure on-site, including planning full power and water from scratch for a 4,500-person off-grid event. Logistics at this level isn't a specialty. It's the baseline.
Systems Diagnosis & Financial Recovery
Diagnose underperforming systems and pinpoint where they're actually losing money — costing gaps, POS pricing errors, labor or managerial misallocation.
Built custom costing tools for several wholesale food producers — including a bakery supplying Whole Foods, PCC, Nordstrom Cafes, and QFC — that caught unallocated labor, delivery, and packaging costs. Combined, this work has saved these companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Consulting for Food Entrepreneurs
A track record of hands-on consulting across the food industry: IP protection for an early gluten-free bakery, POS audits that recovered thousands in annual pricing errors, and recipe development to expand a power bar and granola bar company's product line.
Revenue diversification for a local farm beyond a single annual crop. Wholesale strategy and buyer communication tools that got products onto shelves at QFC and Safeway.
Teams & Leadership Under Pressure
Lead teams across contexts — hired staff, volunteer chefs, or supervised event volunteers — recruiting people who match my own standard, not just whoever's available.
Cross-sector coalition building, facilitation, and stakeholder engagement are a throughline in my work outside the kitchen too — bringing together groups with genuinely different priorities and getting them to a shared plan, not just a meeting. That same skill set extends to employee training design and implementation.
Delivered consistent quality and professionalism at every price point, without the shortcuts common in high-volume catering.
Early on the Trend Line
Launched portion-controlled mini desserts ahead of the category's rise. Wrote a build-your-own healthy salad concept years before that model went mainstream. Served full plant-based wedding menus before that was standard practice.
Built the menu database itself — compound-searchable by allergen and dietary need — years before that kind of tooling was standard in catering.
Sustainability, Built In
Local, seasonal, organic sourcing was the operating model at Genevieve, years before it was standard practice. MBA concentration in carbon footprinting and triple-bottom-line design.
Developed the methodology behind an environmental software platform I founded — a social and environmental impact scoring system — from initial concept in 2007 to a working proof-of-concept piloted with 8 Washington companies in 2015 — work that anticipated what's now called True Cost Accounting.
Beverage Menu Development & Optimization
Beverage programs are where a lot of margin quietly gets left on the table. I build them into a real profit center instead — custom cocktails and mocktails designed to raise check averages, not just round out a menu. Increased beverage sales 21% within one year for a fusion restaurant.
Source distinctive, profitable wines for by-the-glass pours, and build out wine lists that work on two levels at once: real food-pairing logic for the guest, and real margin logic for the business. Developed a beer & wine menu for a cafe that grew revenue 8% annually.
Teaching, because I love it
A frame from the class itself
A class I taught
During the pandemic, I ran a four-part plant-based cooking series on Zoom for friends who wanted to learn vegetarian and vegan cooking — filmed by a professional videographer. This is Class 3: tacos, plus a real conversation about the ethics of cooking food from outside your own culture.
Unpolished but professional — my actual kitchen, my actual friends chiming in on camera as we went. It's an hour long, so here's where to look first if you're short on time:
- The tacos come together start to finish, home-kitchen pace
- The ethics conversation — the part that shows how I think, not just how I cook
- Friends jumping in on camera throughout — this was always meant to be a conversation, not a lecture
A few more
