Get to know CBCI
Expertise & Passion
Meet the Team
We are a devoted team of skilled and gifted chefs, food scientists, business strategists, marketing specialists, and creatives inspired by our Chief Executive Chef Charlie Baggs. Our team is led by some of the most driven and influential professionals in the industry. With hundreds of years of combined experience in the food and beverage industry, you are in some of the most capable hands in the world. See below a few of the key members of our team.
Meet the Team
Founders
Get to know some of the team members including our founder & owner that make our company one of the best in the business.
Charlie Baggs
President & Executive Chef
Starting in 1999, Chef Charlie has led this labor of love to build the food industry’s premium consulting practice. His passion for cooking goes back to his childhood in Indiana when he first learned how to make biscuits and gravy with his father.
Armed with a degree from Purdue University in Hotels, Tourism, and Restaurant Management, Charlie continued his higher education by graduating with honors from the Culinary Institute of America. He then honed his skills working in some of America’s top kitchens including Ambria, Spiaggia, Marriott Hotels, and Walt Disney. Along with knowing ideation facilitation, retort technology, ready to eat (RTE) foods, and aseptic technology, he is an expert in ethnic cuisine, dry seasoning blends, bakery, fine dining, marinating system, deli, food service segments, breading and coatings, sauce applications and formulations.
When not cooking up magic in his kitchen, Charlie enjoys helping teach Boy Scouts how to plan and cook meals around a campfire. A big believer in the concept of giving back, Chef Charlie is an Adjunct Professor at Purdue University, where he taught a course in “Culinary Arts for the Food Scientist” within the Food Sciences Department. He and his team also train students from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Culinology and Product Development. From his culinary center headquarters to his clients’ kitchens to training his next protégée, he can always be found bringing his passion for cooking to life. As a nationally recognized expert in the industry, he has also been a Distinguished Speaker for The Institute of Food Technologists and has shared his expertise as a speaker at the Annual Conferences of the National Restaurant Association and The Research Chefs Association. He and his team also conduct virtual culinary training sessions via webinars from his kitchen.
Kathy Baggs
Chief Administrative Officer
The highlight of Kathy’s professional life is the critical role she has played in working with Charlie to build CBCI and help it grow. While CBCI was growing, Kathy worked in partnership with her husband to manage the essential non-culinary components including marketing, accounting, human resources, and IT.
Prior to helping Chef Charlie grow the business, she put her Bachelor’s Degree in Finance from Suffolk University to work in the financial industry with positions at SQL Financials, Northern Trust Bank, Continental Bank, and the Bank of New England.
While she enjoys having her talented husband take charge of dinner, Kathy is the executive chef when it comes to cooking up the family breakfast and baking holiday treats with the kids. Kathy spent many years volunteering in various roles with the Women’s Food Service Forum. In addition to being Chef Charlie’s business partner, Kathy also manages the many activities of the Baggs family, including their four children and an adorable family dog.
Meet the Team
Leadership
Juliet Greene
Senior Corporate Chef
Chef Juliet Greene discovered her culinary passion at age 15 as an exchange student in Seville, Spain. Throughout her high school years in the U.S., she worked at a local restaurant in her community. Following graduation, she continued to pursue her passion and develop her palate while in New Orleans attending Tulane University, where she pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Business and Spanish.
Upon graduation, Juliet traveled the world in her first career as an international banker, but her desire to cook brought her back to the kitchen for formal culinary training. Chef Juliet Greene earned her Culinary Arts degree from Kendall College in Chicago. She subsequently served as the Culinary Program Director and Lead Instructor for Sur La Table in Chicago. In addition to her savory experience, Chef Juliet worked as a pastry chef for the Racquet Club in Chicago.
She first joined Charlie Baggs Inc. in 2004 in the Chicago office and then opened the Denver office in 2007. In 2012, Chef Juliet left Charlie Baggs to join Leprino Foods as their Global Executive Chef running the culinary departments in both Denver and Singapore. When the opportunity presented itself to rejoin the Charlie Baggs Culinary Innovations team in 2016 as Director of New Business Development and Sr. Corporate Chef, Chef Juliet made the exciting decision to return home to her original roots in the corporate chef world. With a true passion for working with food manufacturers and national accounts, Chef Juliet focuses on driving demand for her clients by bringing real and unique flavors to the menu.
Julie Luby
VP of Research & Development
Julie comes from a food family. Her father grew up on a dairy farm and pursued a career in Agricultural Economics, her mother is a registered dietitian, and her brother is a professor and fruit breeder who helped introduce Honeycrisp apples to the world. Her fondest childhood memories about food involve churning homemade ice cream on the porch, which eventually became the “main dish” for dinner on summer Sunday evenings.
Throughout her 30+ years as a food product development and technical services leader, she has served as a respected thought partner for her colleagues and customers and helped to develop and introduce immensely successful new products in food service and retail. Julie holds a BS in Food Science from Purdue University and an MS in Food Science from Michigan State University. She has worked for companies such as ConAgra Foods, Ralcorp, Bakery Chef, Quaker Oats, General Mills, and Oscar Mayer.
Julie is recognized for collaborating with customer teams to overcome challenges by thinking differently and finding innovative ways to solve detailed industry problems, and being able to communicate complex technical ideas to all audiences. Julie is also a National Board-Certified Functional Medicine Health Coach. In her spare time, she guides clients to live a healthier life than the generations before them and helps them make lifestyle changes to prevent and reverse chronic illnesses such as cognitive decline and diabetes. Her knowledge of healthy eating and living also informs her work in leading the Charlie Baggs Technical Team’s product development work.
Julie’s travels have taken her to every state in the US and many countries in Central America, South America, Asia, and Europe. She has enjoyed eating and experiencing the culture in each of these places!
Zal Taleyarkhan
Corporate Research Chef
Growing up as the son of a Captain in the Indian Merchant Navy, Chef Zal was exposed to a variety of cultures in locations such as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Sydney, which sparked his interest in the culinary world at a young age.
While completing his Bachelor’s Degree in Tourism Studies from the Indira Gandhi National University in India, Zal began his career working for the luxury hotel chain Oberoi. He spent late nights studying and working in all areas, from dishwashing and cooking on the line to butchery, Garde Manger, bakery, and pastry, where he eventually specialized in chocolates. This experience inspired him to gain a more formal culinary training by coming to the U.S. and pursuing an Associate’s Degree in Culinary Arts from Kendall College in Chicago and eventually interning with Charlie Baggs Culinary Innovations.
After working in many notable Chicago restaurants including Perennial, Virant, MiTerra, Alinea, and Jam, Chef Zal returned briefly to India and collaborated with Chef Charlie on a development project with a large prepackaged convenience food manufacturer there. A short time later, he returned to Chicago to work with CBCI, focused on the technical side of product development. Chef Zal is naturally curious and maintains a passion for food investigation and creation, using his time off to experiment with out-of-the-box ideas to blend the science and art of food. He believes imagination balanced with commonsense will get you everywhere. He is incredibly talented at finding unique solutions to our client’s technical challenges and bringing flavor to life.
Michael Battocletti
Business Development & Sales Coordinator/Corporate Chef
Chef Michael Battocletti began his journey into the culinary world at a young age starting by watching his grandmother cook for their family. From birthdays to holidays. His grandmother’s cooking was always the center of the event. She would let him taste things and would explain every step of what she was doing to make each dish truly her own. Now that he is the one cooking for those special holidays, he remembers those special moments with his grandmother and brings that special connection with his grandmother to every dish he creates.
After initially studying international business in college, Michael quickly realized that the corporate business world was not something that he would be happy pursuing. When thinking about what he wanted to do with his life, he thought back to the joy he felt in his kitchen with his grandmother, and he knew that cooking would never stop bringing him joy. Once he completed his education, Michael worked for companies ranging from Lettuce Entertain You as Executive Chef of RPM Steak, RPM Italian, and Mon Ami Gabi. Prior to that, he was a Sous Chef at Next.
For the past few years, Michael has been working with our team to build out our business development capabilities, as well as working with Julie and the culinary team with projects ranging from product development to restaurant operations. His skill set has allowed our staff to expand our creative and business development offerings.
Nothing brings people together like good food.
Lisa Tinegate
Meet the Team
Collaborators
Chase Baggs
Sophie Baggs
Jonathan Crossland
Behind the Scenes
We are constantly developing new and innovative solutions for clients looking to expand their businesses, fill gaps in their market, and generate deep and reliable consumer insights. Our team is one of the best in the food industry, and we are proud of our ability to move quickly, comprehensively solve complex issues, and nimbly navigate the technical side of the food industry.