E7

Carmen Cheung
Canwest News Service

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TORONTO - For Dana McCauley, graduating from university with an English degree would prove to be an important first step into her future career - but not in the way most might think. McCauley had nine different jobs in her first year out of undergrad, and she hated every single one of them.

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Handout/Optimum Public Relations

Dana McCauley is a Toronto-based chef who’s fashioned herself to be Canada’s foremost food trends expert.

Fortunately, this led McCauley back to her first passion - cooking. She enrolled in the renowned Stratford Chef School and soon found work in a few restaurants. While it's no mistake that she's in the food industry, McCauley will be the first to admit that her path into her actual career was a bit of an accident.

Today, Dana McCauley is a Toronto-based chef who's fashioned herself to be Canada's foremost food trends expert. She is the president of her company, Dana McCauley & Associates Ltd., and has been nominated for this year's RBC Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Award.

After graduating from cooking school and gaining valuable work experience at several restaurants, McCauley was presented with an opportunity to work at Canadian Living magazine's test kitchen. She sees this as an important step toward her career today.

McCauley has been an avid cook since childhood. As a kid, she loved playing in the kitchen and dreamed of becoming a chef.

According to an old family story her mother used to tell, McCauley loved to play with a pot, a spoon, and a potato. She would leave her dolls and blocks and gravitate toward the kitchen utensils.

"When I had my own son, (my mother) gave me my baby book ... and sure enough, there it was written, '18 months old, Dana's favourite toys ... ' She wasn't just telling a story, it was true! I was born to it, I really was!" she says.

McCauley's company provides a range of different food services, all of which are driven by food trends. As a food trend expert, McCauley writes a seasonal newsletter of trends which is sent out to her website subscribers. She does recipe development for companies, as well as for cookbooks.

The creativity in recipe development is McCauley's favourite part of the job. She keeps files upon files of things she wants to make and new flavours she wants to try.

Most recently, McCauley was asked to be the spokesperson for a line of Green Giant food products called Green Giant Essentials, for which she developed a few original recipes. Seeing these products come to market is where she says her biggest satisfaction comes from. While her team can complete five to six recipes a week for a recipe project, developing a new food product, she explains, can often take up to two years.

"Really, it's almost like having a baby elephant," she describes with a laugh.

For those who want to enter the industry, McCauley advises them to look to alternate channels of the food business.

"There are so many things you can do. You can be a food stylist, to writing about food, to working in a commercial environment where you're developing new products," she says.

Although she sees nothing wrong with wanting to become a chef to open up a restaurant (she is married to Martin Kouprie, chef and co-owner of Pangaea restaurant in Toronto), she advises those who want to take this path to follow their interests to find a job they actually like that best suits their lifestyle.