Culinary Institute of America instructor Will Rosenzweig a steward to food entrepreneurs
Walking through the garden at Will Rosenzweig’s Healdsburg farmhouse provides a glimpse at the way this successful entrepreneur and academician approaches the business of food.
Unlike the machine-based society of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, Rosenzweig views business as more akin to a living organism that requires diversity and respect for human beings, so that it can grow organically.
“I really like it when plants grow together and become symbiotic,” Rosenzweig said while giving a tour of the 3-acre property. “In a garden, you start out with things that already exist - soil, water, climate. Then you envision how to solve a problem or meet a need. It’s the same in business.”
The many worlds of Rosenzweig - venture capital and gardening, academia and art - overlap here at the energy-efficient Victorian he renovated with his wife, Dr. Carla Fracchia, an obstetrician/gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco.
From the English rose garden in front to the California natives by the pool and the giant palm tree outside the kitchen, the garden connects Rosenzweig to nature and to the deep knowledge of the food world he has cultivated for the past 25 years, first as founding CEO of The Republic of Tea in 1992, then as managing partner of the venture capital firm Physic Ventures of San Francisco, which he founded in 2006 to invest in healthy, do-good companies.
In 2010, Rosenzweig received the prestigious Oslo Business for Peace Award, given annually to people around the globe who have grown businesses that are both socially beneficial and financially sensible.
For the past 16 years, he also has taught at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, serving as its first professor of social entrepreneurship and as director of the school’s Center for Responsible Business, founded in part by Paul Newman.
“I really enjoy teaching,” said Rosenzweig, 56. “Learning from smart, talented people is a gift. If you listen to students, you see the future ”
In his latest academic position as dean of the new Food Business School based at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, Rosenzweig continues to steward other food entrepreneurs and give back to a growing field he views as ripe for change and innovation.
“There’s a growing interest in food and the food system ... not just eating but nutrition, where it comes from and how to grow it,” he said. “It’s clearly ready for innovation. The food we’ve been using was designed for a different time and place.”
Touted as the nation’s first business school dedicated to food entrepreneurship, the school rolled out its first classes last spring at the CIA’s Greystone campus in St. Helena and has plans to move its offices and courses in 2016 to the Copia campus in downtown Napa.
Emergng entrepreneurs
Online courses are aimed at emerging entrepreneurs attending other schools or working at jobs, while Innovation Intensives (short, three- or four-day immersion programs) are aimed at proven food entrepreneurs who are trying to take their businesses to the next level. Rosenzweig also hopes to train industry leaders who can innovate into the future.
“The CIA is the oldest and most prestigious culinary college,” he said. “They’ve embarked on broadening their impact and scope ... the Food Business School is intended to prepare a new generation of leaders to reinvent the food system.”
Like other graduate or executive level programs, the Food Business School curriculum developed by Rosenzweig revolves around pragmatic, skill-based learning. Right now, students do not earn credits, but plans for accreditation are in the works.
“We see ourselves as a start-up,” Rosenzweig said. “We could design courses and seek accreditation, but we flipped that and said, ‘Let’s build courses that people want.’ It’s human-centered design.”
The Food Business School will expand this spring with more online courses, as well as immersion courses held in New York City and San Francisco. This spring, it also will launch the Food Venture Lab, a three-month program designed to enable future industry leaders to pinpoint pressing problems in the current food system, then create businesses to solve them.
One of Rosenzweig’s biggest success stories comes from two of his UC Berkeley students, Kristin Groos Richmond and Kirsten Saenz Tobey. They created Revolution Foods, the country’s largest purveyor of healthy school meals. The company also produces healthy packaged meals sold at grocery stores.
“They came up with the idea and wrote the business plan in my course,” Rosenzweig said. “That started at one little charter school in Oakland, and it’s now in 12 major cities and seven states. When I see that level of impact - 1.5 million meals a week in schools - that kind of consciousness really inspires me.”
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