When Christopher Henning became Executive Director of Dining at UC Berkeley six years ago, he stepped into a program that had gone through a significant leadership gap — no direct handoff, no institutional memory to draw on. What followed was a master plan process, a complete data infrastructure build, and a campus expansion that has brought new housing, new dining commons, and new campus restaurant concepts online in rapid succession.

The challenges at Berkeley are real: a competitive Bay Area labor market where culinary talent is hard to find and expensive to keep, deferred maintenance across aging facilities, and a geographic campus layout that historically made it difficult for students to access their meal plans during peak hours. The team’s response to each has been methodical — building internal culinary training pipelines, piloting a GrubHub partnership, developing Tableau-based dashboards for real-time labor and food cost visibility, and leaning on cross-campus relationships to get things done.

In this conversation with Sojo Alex, Christopher reflects on what the master plan process taught him, what he would have done differently, and what he tells colleagues early in a similar journey.

Christopher’s takeaway = Relationships come first. You can’t move a complex dining program forward without the trust of your finance partners, your capital projects team, your IT colleagues, and your own staff. Build those connections early, celebrate the progress you’re making, and remember that this work is a marathon.