Student Profile: Cooking Up Change

Max Mong '08
Summer Internship: PepsiCo

My parents were entrepreneurs, and dinner represented the one time throughout the week when our family really interacted. My father loved to cook, so cooking gave me an opportunity to bond with him. He passed away the summer of my junior year in college. It was an extremely difficult time for me, but every time I cooked, I found peace in a way that I couldn’t find through any other outlet. Something clicked. I realized that this could be a career.

A good cook has an exceptional palate, has exceptional knife skills, a very, very unnatural sense of urgency — the moment you walk into a kitchen, you don't talk, you keep your head down, you work — and soul, an ability to connect with the food and understand what engages people. On those four, my palate was average, my knife skills were terrible, my sense of urgency was nonexistent, and soul — I think that was the one thing I had going for me.

I made a list of about 29 restaurants in New York City. At this point I had no experience. The last restaurant I contacted was Chanterelle. Chanterelle was a different kind of restaurant, with long-time cooks, so they could afford to have volunteers come in and work.

I lived at home with my mother. I was going to cooking school and working for free, even after I moved over to Union Pacific, which was Rocco DiSpirito’s place. I told them I’d do whatever it took to work there and finally they said, “Okay, here are the terms: You work for free, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the nights you have to go to school we'll let you leave at 4:00."

Eventually, they offered me an actual job and I worked at Union Pacific for a year, and it turned out to be a great experience. But I felt restricted by the rigidness of the structure, so when the opportunity came to work at Spago Beverly Hills, I jumped at it. I worked there two years and I blossomed. I learned how to make sauces, how to make fresh pasta. I matured as a person. But I wanted to work on my leadership skills. I was a skilled chef, but I had never managed anyone. I got a job as a sous chef at another restaurant, which led to a new restaurant, Sona in West Hollywood, where I became the executive sous chef. The great thing about Sona was that they involved me in every step of the process, from escrow to construction. But it really consumed everything else. I found myself thinking, "Okay, I'm 27 years old. Am I really prepared to spend the next 50 years of my life where this is all I know?”

I still love food, but I don’t want to be in restaurants right now. The more skillful you become as a chef, the more you tend to work in fine-dining restaurants, cooking for fewer and fewer people. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The more skilled you become, the more others should benefit from it, no? The truth is that the world’s greatest chefs collectively do little to improve areas where they can make a difference: world hunger, obesity, and energy consumption. Restaurants waste a lot of food and they are notoriously inefficient with respect to energy consumption. Healthy food can be fast, convenient, and affordable. Chefs are trained to make inexpensive food taste great. They just haven’t made the effort.

People often ask me why I decided to go to business school. The same qualities that attracted me to cooking led me to business school: learning new skills while honing others, broadening my personal and professional development, and exploring new ways to leverage my passion for food.

I interned at Pepsi this summer. It was a wonderful experience. I was in the Innovation department, where I was given two projects: a consulting project and a more traditional marketing project. The exact words they gave me for the first one were, “We want you to develop an open innovation framework.” It was up to me to take that and find out the information they needed. This presented a major challenge, but it was thrilling because the very success of the project depended upon me. The second project was to study whether Pepsi should re-launch a dead concept, a premium sparkling grape juice. This was a traditional marketing project and it required all the skills I’d learned at SOM. I’m not sure where my career will take me from here. My hope is that it’s as rewarding and exciting as what’s come before.

Interviewed on April 13 and September 20, 2007.