Founder & Culinary Sustainability Consultant at Forward Dining Solutions, LLC.

Empathy is incredibly important if you’re going to become a great leader. As a chef consultant I come across chefs who often don’t want to adopt what I’m there to promote. It takes an empathetic leader to work with those chefs and clients to understand their concerns so that you can begin to move forward.

I don’t think I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for having mentors to help me realize what qualities are important and how to foster them. It’s served me greatly and I hope to help the next generation of chefs learn the same lessons.

I’m inspired every day to want to help lead the industry into a more sustainable and responsible direction. I hope to help create kitchens that foster creativity and learning while staying focused on speed, efficiency, and thermal comfortability. For decades chefs have had to endure working in conditions that leave much to be desired and through my work I hope to allow chefs to focus more on their craft in a more comfortable and equitable environment.

I’m constantly reading, watching videos, and seeking council from my peers. It’s partially what led me to start my podcast “Sustainable Overload”. My thirst for knowledge has led me to talking with top professionals like Gerald L. Ford CMC, Brady Seals, and Rachelle Boucher to name a few. If I don’t know something I immediately look it up and when I have free time, I immerse myself in the topic.

I’ve been blessed to say that I have a few places that have impacted my career; mainly two places come to mind. (1)The first is my time as an apprentice at the Greenbrier of West Virginia where I worked for a world-renowned Certified Master Chef Richard Rosendale as he prepared for the Bocuse d’Or (a very prestigious global competition). It was in the middle of one of the greatest experiences of my professional career. I learned from several Master chefs and past culinary Olympians while having world renowned chefs cycle in and out of the resort to help train him. My time there accelerated my career by decades and gave me insights I never dreamed I would have. (2) The second place that has had the most impact on me and my career is when I was at the helm of Chatham University’s Eden Hall Campus. This was the world’s first fully self-sustained university campus, and I was tasked with developing the country’s first all-electric campus kitchen. It was here that I developed my passion for sustainability and learned all there is to know about commercial kitchen electrification and decarbonization. This job set me up to be the nation’s leading expert in commercial kitchen electrification and work with the William J. Worthen Foundation on developing “The Design Professional’s Guide to Decarbonization of the Built Environment.” So essentially, I helped write the book on the electrify-everything movement!