From crafting innovative new products to breaking down barriers in a male-dominated industry, women in the quick-service culinary space are reshaping what it means to rise to the top from the back of the house.
These experts have tackled obstacles, sparked change, and are taking their respective brands to new heights. They are making their mark on the menu, and more opportunities remain.
Tacos Beyond Boundaries
As the director of culinary at Velvet Taco, chef Venecia Willis has the creative freedom to pull from a wide range of global flavors. The brand was founded on the idea that tacos don’t have to be limited to Tex-Mex, and for Willis, that means blending diverse ingredients to create a multicultural flavor experience.
“With a tortilla as the vessel, you can make anything a taco,” she says. “I love that I’m not limited by any one cuisine or specific elements within the culinary world. There are no limitations here. I love that freedom.”
Recently, she has been leading a menu expansion test to see how a bowl might fit within Velvet Taco’s offerings—a significant departure for a brand that “has never been anything but tacos.” With international expansion into London on the horizon, she’s also refining recipes and adjusting flavor profiles to suit an entirely new market.
That work is the culmination of a lifelong passion for food. She recalls declaring at a young age that she would grow up to be a chef. Her grandmother, reflecting the norms of her time, gently told her that women typically didn’t pursue careers as professional chefs.
“Back then, it was kind of frowned upon for women to be in the industry,” Willis says. “There wasn’t a pathway already charted. So, she would say, ‘I don’t know about that, but you’ll figure out what you want to be.’”
Willis shifted gears and set her sights on becoming a surgeon. But after graduating with her bachelor’s degree, she felt the kitchen calling her name and made a last-minute decision to apply for culinary school instead of medical school.
She took a part-time kitchen job at Roti Mediterranean Grill while earning a degree in culinary management. Not long after, she was opening the fast-casual chain’s fifth unit as a back-of-house manager. She quickly climbed the ranks from there, transitioning from an hourly employee to a corporate managerial role and eventually leading culinary operations at Roti, and later, at Protein Bar and Kitchen. In 2021, she joined Velvet Taco.
“I came in and it just clicked,” she says. “I love getting to do very out-of-the-box things. That’s just who I am.”
Velvet Taco’s boundary-pushing approach is most evident in its Weekly Taco Features (WTF), an LTO program that introduces a new taco 52 times a year. But constantly rolling out new flavors without adding unnecessary complexity is a challenge. Willis must find ways to introduce fresh flavor profiles while keeping the process manageable for restaurant teams.
“I try to be in the restaurants as much as I can,” she says. “That’s a big part of who I am. I like staying connected to the restaurants and working alongside team members.”
One of her biggest challenges is managing culinary execution across a growing number of locations. Unlike fine dining, where chefs can make on-the-fly adjustments in a single kitchen, her recipes must be flawless before rollout.
Sourcing ingredients consistently across multiple distribution centers is another hurdle. Willis often has to tweak recipes to accommodate regional availability or find creative ways to use existing ingredients to achieve a desired flavor.
“You have to be very operationally focused with fast casual, because the last thing you want is the ops team to come in and go, ‘What the heck were you thinking? We cannot do this,’” she says. “What I love about that is that it comes with feeding so many people, much more than I would at a Michelin-starred restaurant with 24 seats. I wouldn’t change that for the world.”
Willis’ success is proof of how much has changed since her grandmother’s time. But being a woman in the industry has still shaped her experience, especially early in her career.
“Proving my capabilities and creativity to leaders early on was a challenge,” she says. “It took a while, but I was relentless. I never gave up. If I thought of something, I’d cook it on the weekend. I’d bring ingredients to my apartment, make stuff I thought would be great to expand the menu, and present it to people. I would do whatever I could to get food in front of someone.”
Modernizing the Menu
Few quick-service menu items are as iconic as KFC’s original fried chicken. But the women of the KFC U.S. Food Innovation and Technology (FIT) Lab do far more than safeguard the classic recipe—they’re also shaping the brand’s future and developing new strategies to attract younger customers.
Heading up those efforts is Diane Miller, director of food innovation at KFC U.S. Miller didn’t set out to build a career in the restaurant industry. After earning a degree in biology, she landed a job in Papa Johns’ quality assurance lab, a position she initially found puzzling.
“Why does Papa Johns need a lab position? I remember being confused by that posting,” she recalls. “At this point in my life, I’d never even heard of food science. I didn’t know that was even a career, but I had all the qualifications to work in a lab with my biology degree. So I started, and on day one, I was introduced to this whole new world that meshes both science and food in such a fun way. I immediately fell in love.”
Miller went on to earn a master’s in food science and joined KFC as a senior commercialization manager before stepping into her current role in 2018. Today, she oversees the entire food innovation process, from ideation and testing to full-scale commercialization. Along the way, she’s learned more than a few lessons about what it takes to succeed in food innovation, including the importance of confidence and speaking up.
“You can aspire to whatever level you want through hard work, consistency, and being yourself,” she says. “There are so many opinions in food, so when you’re tasting, you have to be honest.”
Early in her career, Miller noticed a tendency among junior team members to stay quiet during tastings when senior leaders were present. Now, when mentoring the next generation, she emphasizes the importance of offering genuine feedback.
“The reality is you’re there to give your opinion, so be honest,” she says. “That’s how I was taught early on in my career, and that’s what I stand by, versus just following suit with what others are saying.”
Curiosity is another key trait for anyone looking to thrive in quick-service culinary innovation, says Claire Brandenburg, a product innovation manager at KFC who has been with the company for 15 years.
“You need to be an avid learner, want to know what’s new, and keep track of what competitors are doing,” she says. “If you have that curiosity, then everything else falls into place.”
Brandenburg’s role involves working closely with culinary experts and suppliers while studying emerging food and flavor trends to integrate them into KFC’s menu. In recent years, much of that work has focused on making the menu more portable and introducing bolder, spicier options. One of the team’s latest innovations is Saucy, a new spinoff concept centered around sauces and chicken tenders.
“It’s exciting how the younger generation seems to be more curious about food,” Brandenburg says. “It keeps us on our toes, questioning what we should bring to our menu to continue pushing the limits for those consumers, because that’s what they’re all about.”
Beyond creating new flavors and formats, the FIT Lab team is passionate about introducing younger generations—particularly young women—to food science. Like Miller, Brandenburg didn’t know food science was a viable career until she stumbled into it, and she believes the industry needs to do a better job educating students about the opportunities at the intersection of food and science.
She also encourages women to have the confidence to carve out a space for themselves in the industry.
“I grew up in the KFC company with women in leadership telling me to be bold, brave, and use my voice,” Brandenburg says. “That’s how you move forward and get a seat at the table.”
Unlocking Innovation
Kaitlyn Venable never imagined leading a Texas culinary institution. Dining out was rare, but a single taste of risotto at a fine-dining restaurant sparked her passion for cooking and set her on a path to becoming a chef.
By 16, Venable began working at Brennan Family Restaurants to gain experience while finishing high school. After graduating from The Culinary Institute of America and the University of Houston, she joined Luby’s, a Texas staple, where she worked her way up from assistant manager to corporate chef. Venable later joined SPB Hospitality, overseeing culinary strategy and innovation for nearly a dozen brands.
In 2023, she became Shipley Do-Nuts’ first-ever executive chef at just 35 years old.
“Shipley is the doughnut I grew up eating,” she says. “It’s another Texas legacy brand, so it’s really cool to be part of something that’s so iconic.”
As a one-woman team, Venable works cross-functionally with finance, supply chain, and marketing, interacting with leadership and other departments more than she ever has before. One part of the job that she especially enjoys is collaborating with the training team when new products are introduced. She often steps in to help with field training, lending an extra set of hands when needed.
For the first time in Shipley’s history, the brand is leaning into product innovation to drive engagement and increase sales. Overseeing the development of those new menu items is her favorite part of the job.
“Product innovation is my heart and soul,” she says. “We’re turning 89 years old this year, I’m the first chef hired for the brand, and innovation is new. So, how do we bring new items to the brand, but preserve that heritage and legacy at the same time?”
Under Venable’s leadership, Shipley has introduced its first new limited-time products in decades, including doughnuts featuring Skittles and Oreo cookies, as well as its first-ever limited-time holiday menu in November. Additionally, the brand added egg as a protein to its kolache platform, a move that introduced savory pastries filled with meat, cheese, jalapeños, and more.
“That has been the most successful category launch in the brand’s history,” she says. “It was new to the system and it was new operationally, so it actually took us probably nine months of development to get it right. It was really cool to see that come to life and blow all the projections out of the water.”
The brand is maintaining momentum into 2025 with the introduction of new mini beignets. Next up, Venable is turning her attention to beverages, which she believes will be key to Shipley’s expansion beyond the breakfast daypart and into snacking occasions.
Venable takes pride in the work she’s done to introduce innovation and help push Shipley into the future and says the title of “executive chef” holds the most meaning to her. Seeing it on her name badge for the first time was a significant, emotional milestone—one that carries weight because “not many women have reached that level.”
“I’m getting a little more seasoned,” she says. “I have some wrinkles and gray hairs now, but I would say the combination of my age and my gender has been my overall biggest challenge in my career.”
Venable credits her mentors for helping her overcome self-doubt. Their guidance not only fostered her professional development but also instilled in her the importance of knowing her own worth. Now, she strives to do the same for the next generation of women pursuing careers in the culinary world.
Looking back on her early days in the industry, Venable remembers her first executive telling her to “always be a sponge”—staying open to new ideas, embracing challenges, and absorbing as much knowledge as possible.
“That’s always stuck with me,” she says. “Also, especially for kids that are coming out of school and looking for jobs, I always tell them to be open to unexpected opportunities, because they may open doors that you can’t see right now.”
