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Women’s Chef Exchange Launches to Build More Leadership Opportunities
New Non-Profit's First Chef Cohort Heads to Italy in October
The path to becoming an executive chef can be particularly difficult for women, even though women make up most students entering culinary schools.
That disconnect — and the opportunity to change it — was at the heart of the official launch of the Women’s Chef Exchange, a new nonprofit organization designed to help women chefs build the skills, connections, confidence and professional networks needed to advance into culinary leadership.
At a September 14 event, a panel representing several corners of the food system described a program that will combine international exchange, mentorship, sustainability and hands-on kitchen experience.
The centerpiece is an exchange program beginning in October, when three emerging women chefs from the United States will travel to Italy for two weeks. They will work alongside established Italian “Mentor Chefs,” learning about local food traditions, ingredients, culinary culture and sustainability practices.
A reciprocal visit is planned for spring 2027, when three emerging women chefs from Italy will come to Chicago to work in local restaurant kitchens.
The program's founders believe that the exchange can accomplish something larger than simply exposing chefs to another country's cuisine: It can help create a network of women culinary leaders who can bring new ideas back to their own kitchens and communities.
“This is a program all about helping develop the next generation of female culinary leaders,” said Sylvia Perez, a longtime Chicago television news anchor and a member of the Women's Chef Exchange board, who moderated the panel.
Idea Born During the Pandemic
The organization grew out of the working relationship between board members Diane Schmidt and Sarah Stegner, who co-founded the organization.
Diane, former head of the Healthy Fare for Kids non-profit, and Sarah, chef/owner of Prairie Grass Cafe in Northbrook and co-founder of the Chicago Chefs Cook culinary philanthropic nonprofit, had worked together on Healthy Fare for Kids for a decade.
When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the hospitality industry, Diane began thinking about how an exchange could help chefs reconnect and rebuild. She had been traveling in Italy and saw firsthand how severely the pandemic had affected chefs, culinary schools and the hospitality community.
“I came back and I talked to Sarah, which is my natural thing to do,” Diane said. “And she said, ‘Let's focus on women, and let's focus on women being the pivotal partners in developing sustainability practices in their kitchens.’” That became the foundation of the Women's Chef Exchange.
The need is particularly evident in the gap between the number of women entering culinary education and the number reaching executive positions in professional kitchens.
Diane cited a figure of women representing a majority of culinary students, compared with fewer than 10 percent of executive or chef leadership positions in independent kitchens. She said the figure is higher in chain restaurants, at roughly 20 percent, but that the disparity also exists in Italy.
The Exchange, she said, is intended to address that gap by creating opportunities for women to learn from one another, develop relationships and bring sustainability practices into their professional kitchens.
“The underlying theme of this whole program is to share, connect, network with other women, women chefs, to empower these younger chefs, the next generation,” Diane said.
The Power of Mentorship
For Sarah, mentorship is one of the most important elements of the program. “If you talk to women chefs that are successful, almost all of them have some form of mentorship that helped them get where they are,” she said.
Her own professional interests have long included tracing food back to its source and encouraging regenerative agriculture. The Women's Chef Exchange allows her to connect those interests with her desire to help women gain greater recognition and opportunity within professional kitchens.
Sarah said the program is deliberately focused on individual relationships. “Sometimes it's more impactful when it's one,” she said. “That one person matters.”
The program's Mentor Chefs will be central to making those relationships possible. Established chefs in Italy and the United States will invite emerging chefs into their kitchens, where the visitors will work with them on menus, ingredients, sourcing, cooking techniques and sustainability projects.
The Mentor Chefs also will nominate women to participate as emerging chefs in the program. “They're really the backbone of this whole process,” Diane said.
The idea is that the visiting chefs won't simply observe a different culinary culture — they'll work in it. “Let's go pick things up at the farmers market. Let's cook them together. Let's talk about the culture,” Diane said, describing the kind of experience Mentor Chefs will provide.
Sustainable to the Core
The panel's broader discussion demonstrated why the founders see sustainability and women's culinary leadership as interconnected.
Tracy Boychuk — founder of The Roof Crop, a Chicago company that creates and maintains green roofs and productive landscapes — described the rooftop agriculture operation at the Flashpoint Innovation facility where the event was held.
The Roof Crop began roughly a decade ago as a marketing concept for selling green roofs. Chicago regulations were encouraging developers to install green roofs, but Tracy said many developers viewed them as an expense rather than an investment.
Her company began demonstrating how roofs could become productive landscapes, growing food and other useful plants while providing people who work in the buildings with an opportunity to interact directly with them.
“It was really a sustainability project in an urban environment,” Tracy said, describing a vision that extends beyond food production to reconnecting urban residents with plants, growing and food. The operation has evolved into a variety of small-scale experiments involving food, natural dyes, flowers and other products.
Tracy described partnerships with chefs and other food businesses as an important part of that evolution. “I see these guys and the chefs that I've met as mentors in terms of how we're growing,” she said. “I'm not a traditional farmer, but we found ways to farm that I think are really smart and unique.”
The emphasis on collaboration mirrors the Women's Chef Exchange's philosophy: New ideas emerge when people with different skills and experiences work together.
From Rooftop “Scraps” to New Ingredients
Adam Moore, founder and chef at Flashpoint Innovation, described another link in that chain.
Flashpoint works on food and beverage innovation for major restaurant chains, airlines, cruise lines, hotels, universities and other large foodservice operators. Its chef-driven approach is intended not only to generate new menu ideas but to help those ideas move through the supply chain and become commercially viable.
One of the company's major sustainability goals is reducing plastic in the food supply chain. Another is finding productive uses for food material that might otherwise be discarded.
Adam said Flashpoint prefers the terms “scrap” and “trim” to “waste.” The company's kitchen and fermentation cellar have become a laboratory for exploring what can be done with materials that normally would have little value. That includes ingredients and plant material coming from the rooftop.
Adam described experiments with dahlia flowers, stems and tubers, looking at applications ranging from savory and sweet foods to beverages. The company also works with fermentation and preservation techniques that can turn materials such as citrus peels, onion skins, mushroom trim and other scraps into seasonings, flavorings and other ingredients.
The larger goal, he said, is to demonstrate ideas on a small scale that eventually can be adopted by much larger foodservice operations. “What we're hoping is that when we look back in five, 10-plus years, we'll see some very measurable change,” Adam said.
The approach also reflects the exchange's philosophy: Innovation is most useful when it can be brought back into everyday kitchens.
Firing Up Kitchen Efficiency
Viviana Martinez, a regional corporate chef for Rational AG, brought yet another perspective to the discussion. Viviana oversees Rational's central region, supporting professional kitchen operators in their use of the company's cooking technology.
A native of Colombia, she had worked in restaurants, operated a family restaurant and done consulting before joining Rational. She said her work has allowed her to travel, encounter different culinary cultures and continue developing professionally.
She also offered one of the evening's clearest examples of the leadership gap the Women's Chef Exchange hopes to address. Viviana noted that when she worked for Rational's Colombian subsidiary, she was the only woman chef on the team.
“I'm really proud to be a woman in a corporate world,” she said.
Sylvia immediately pointed to that experience as an illustration of why the exchange exists. The goal, she said, is to connect all of these seemingly separate pieces — agriculture, sustainability, food waste, culinary technology and professional kitchens — while giving emerging women chefs the tools to become leaders.
International Exchange Shaped in Chicago
The first chef cohort will leave for Italy in October. Diane said the organization has raised enough funding to launch the initial trip with three emerging chefs from Chicago. The organization is continuing to raise funds to bring the three Italian chefs to Chicago in the spring.
The pilot program is intended as the beginning of something much larger. Sarah said the organization is seeking corporate sponsorships and additional community support to expand the number of exchanges and participants.
She also emphasized that the organization's definition of sustainability is intentionally broad. “It’s regenerative agriculture, it’s zero waste, it’s extending the seasons, it’s supporting your own community,” Sarah said. “It's all those things together.”
That broader perspective was evident throughout the evening. The chefs and food professionals gathered for the launch represented restaurants, corporate foodservice, urban agriculture, food innovation and culinary philanthropy. Yet the panel repeatedly returned to the same themes: relationships, mentorship, exchange and the ability to turn small experiments into larger changes.
The evening concluded with a tasting that featured dishes prepared by chefs connected to the organization, including Tigist Reda of Demera Ethiopian Restaurant, Jauvaneeka Jacobs of Frontera Grill, Arshiya Farheen of Verzenay, as well and Sarah Stegner, Viviana Martinez and, the Flashpoint team.
The dishes reflected the cultural breadth that the Women's Chef Exchange hopes to make central to its work. Tigist prepared injera and a traditional snack; Jauvaneeka presented Oaxacan beef barbacoa with heirloom corn tortillas; Arshiya prepared roasted carrot-cashew hummus and a blueberry-peach cake; Sarah served goat cheese cheesecake and roasted pink banana squash; and Viviana presented dishes inspired by her Colombian roots, including arepas with braised beef and a pork belly ceviche.
For the founders, those dishes represented more than the culmination of an evening's programming. They were examples of what happens when chefs bring their heritage, experience and curiosity into the kitchen — and then have the opportunity to learn from someone else.
Sarah returned to the story of Viviana being the only woman chef on her corporate team. “That story right there is everything,” she said. “We need to change that narrative.”
The Women's Chef Exchange is setting out to do that one chef, one mentor and one international kitchen at a time.
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