Her Story
About Gwen
Gwen Santana is a foodservice operations and hospitality management professional with 28 years of experience in the hospitality food service industry. She currently runs and operates the food program at Johns Hopkins University Applied through Urus, a sector of Compass Group. This large campus serves 9,000 employees across five different points of contact for food services, including marketplaces, Starbucks cafes, and multiple micro-markets, with additional expansion planned. Santana leads teams of chefs, frontline hourly employees, and cooks while focusing on corporate standards, marketing, employee engagement, and client engagement. She emphasizes hands-on leadership without micromanaging, prioritizes work-life balance, and is committed to developing her team. She holds a Culinary Arts and Restaurant Management degree from the Art Institute of New York City, where she was born and raised.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Gwen
01What do you attribute your success to?
I definitely feel like I have a strong background from even when I was a little girl growing up. I was born and raised in New York City. And I've always had a lot of really great influential people, starting from my parents, to try to train me to be the best person I could be. Hopefully I'm imparting some of that knowledge to my children, but the point is to have the understanding to work as hard as I can and do what I can, so I feel like I am level-headed. But I'm never gonna stop learning, never gonna stop growing.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice, and probably the most used in my mind, the one that I keep repeating, is always control the controllables. There's always every millions and millions of moving parts, but if you try to focus on everything all at once, it's never gonna work. If you prioritize things and make sure you train your team and train yourself how to think appropriately and focus on the right things at the right time. That's how you gotta move forward.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It's not always about where you are now, and not always about the people that you see, getting to places where you think they don't achieve at, or should be at. It's about how strong you can bring your talents to this industry. Like, don't wait for a seat to be given to you. Bring the seat, build the seat.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
We're living in a weird situation currently as far as what our week-to-week looks like agriculturally, agricultural climate, our FDA approval situations, and overall the understanding of there's still till this day five six years later still a hard transition from quarantine COVID to what a day-to-day a week-to-week work week looks like. Those challenges are really important to understand and to work around especially when you're trying to be innovative and trying to engage clientele to come out and have the experiences the food experiences that we want to provide. And of course dealing with whatever we're having with challenges as far as things that we have to be cautious about for any recalls or any kind of cooking standards.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Honesty is the most important part of everything that I stand for as a person as a leader anywhere in my life. There's always an opportunity to make sure we talk about things in real time if we can. But honesty is important. Honesty is really foremost important to me.
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