Editor’s Note: This special feature focuses on professional chefs from various facets of the foodservice industry. Culinarians answer questions delving into their views of current foodservice developments and how culinary students can obtain positions within different industries. Introduce your students to a plethora of foodservice career options. Click here to view the previous profiles.

In what foodservice area do you work?
I am in foodservice communications. I am the founder of Tasty Bits Consulting and am a strategic marketing and communications specialist consulting with several clients. That’s a very broad term covering a variety of foodservice and some non-food projects. I love to learn new things, so I’ve acquired a lot of skills that I can use to work on a broad range of opportunities.

Briefly describe your position.
My current clients include the California Avocado Commission, for whom I do foodservice public relations work, including pitching stories to various media outlets and copywriting. I’ll be proofreading a restaurant cookbook later this month, while in January I finished editing 72 chef recipes to be published online for 12 different foodservice companies. During the pandemic, when foodservice was very slow, I was able to transfer many of my PR and advertising skills to non-food work as well. So, every day is different!

Where do you see your foodservice area in five years?
The foodservice industry has a lot of challenges to grapple with around labor and product sourcing. I love to help find process improvements like new ways of approaching restaurant marketing or promoting foodservice products. One of the things we all missed the most during the lockdown was gathering with friends and family. There will always be a need for coming together over food. We just have to figure out how to do that with a multitude of new hurdles.

Describe two current foodservice trends you are seeing right now.
Sustainability is a huge area of growth right now—and I hope it’s not just a trend. With more concerns around ingredient transportation and food waste, the foodservice industry must consider how to get customers on board with seasonal and low-waste eating.

I’m also excited to see the growth of more creative plant-based main courses that aren’t just pasta or salad. So many chefs are borrowing culinary influences from around the world to make interesting vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes.

What steps would you advise culinary graduates to take in securing a position in today's market?
Network! Meet as many different types of food people as you can. I didn’t realize that there were so many options other than working in a restaurant or bakery when I graduated from culinary school. Eventually, I learned about endless opportunities in publishing, writing, promoting, and now social media. And consulting! Figure out what’s missing from the market and how to get involved in fixing it.

Please describe one surprising event in your professional life that made a valuable impact on your career today.
When I was in cooking school, I shared an off-campus house with the daughter of Susan Purdy, the cookbook author. She hired and taught me how to test recipes and write them to include thorough information on doneness, quantity, and consistent results. That really launched my interest in editing cookbooks and helping chefs write successful recipes.

About Ann Martin Rolke
Ann is a strategic marketing and communications specialist in Northern California with a deep knowledge of culinary, foodservice, and consumer food industries from more than 35 years of experience. A graduate of Duke University and the Culinary Institute of America, Ann has worked front and back of house in restaurants on both coasts. She has represented food clients through Tasty Bits Consulting and at Ketchum Public Relations, written food stories and recipes for newspapers and magazines, and copy-edited many cookbooks for publishers such as Chronicle Books, ABRAMS, and Weldon Owen. She wrote her own cookbook, Hands-Off Cooking (Wiley), in 2007.

Ann has written restaurant reviews and regular food columns, tested and developed recipes, and run nutrition analyses for food clients. She was the VP of Marketing + Communications for the California Restaurant Association, where she developed and implemented marketing programs for the association, foundation, and related businesses. Currently, she provides marketing and communications consulting for clients including the California Avocado Commission and the State of California’s COVID-19 Vaccinate All 58 campaign.