Shannon Donahue Supports and Innovate in Multiple Arenas for Bon Appetit

Shannon Donahue

As marketing manager/café supervisor for Bon Appétit at Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto, Calif., Shannon Donahue has the unique ability to support and innovate in multiple arenas.

Shannon Donahue, Stanford Graduate School of Business Details:

Marketing Manager/Café Supervisor, Bon Appétit, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Palo Alto

Age: 26

Education: B.A. in anthropological sciences from Stanford University, Palo Alto

Years at Stanford Graduate School of Business: 1

Why Selected?

Maisie Greenawalt, vice president of marketing, says: Shannon has the unique ability to support and innovate in multiple arenas. In addition to being an excellent marketing professional, she is also an extremely talented writer, a chef and a passionate food advocate.

Shannon used her culinary skills and passion for healthy food to help develop a vegan training program that is helping all of our chefs prepare healthy, vegan meals. She created a Bon Appétit Management Co. style guide for the field to help with all of our menu-writing guidelines. Shannon also started and maintained the vegetable garden at Bon Appétit’s corporate headquarters.

Get to know :

What has been your proudest accomplishment?

Helping to implement the initiatives that attracted me to Bon Appétit in the first place, such as our Low Carbon Diet program. For me that meant working with our accounts to make sure our messaging was getting across as meaningful

What would you say you excel at over more seasoned colleagues?

A lot of the food trends like food trucks and DIY pickling and canning have become really popular among my friends, so I’m good at being able to bring those to our guests on a much larger scale.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

I’d say going from a corporate role to an operations one. It’s a completely different environment. It’s been a totally new way of thinking and approaching problems.

What’s been your most rewarding moment?

In my previous role I was able to work on a culinary training for our chefs. I was able to work with the team on a vegan chef training that was rolled out across the country. Not only did I help develop the training, but I also got to help out at the training in California, which was an incredible experience.

What would you like to accomplish in your career in the next two years?

I think there are still a lot of opportunities to make foodservice more responsive to trends. I also really want to make the connection between what we’re doing at corporate and what we’re doing in the field.

What's been your funniest on-the-job disaster?

We serve beer and wine and there was only a waiter’s corkscrew. I had never used one before, so I had everyone looking at me like, ‘how do you not know how to use that?’ I also didn’t know that the pilot light on the stove was supposed to stay on all the time.