Cullen Gilchrist is an American

restaurateur A restaurateur is a person who opens and runs restaurants professionally. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who owns a restaurant, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspe ...

, economist and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of

Union Kitchen Union Kitchen is an American business incubator based in Washington, D.C. Union Kitchen merges the concepts of a shared kitchen and a business incubator, catering primarily to small food businesses. History Union Kitchen was founded as Black Stra ...

, an accelerator of food businesses.

Education and career

Cullen obtained his high school diploma from Dartmouth High School in 2003. He attended

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

and earned a degree in Economics and Sociology in 2007. After graduating, he began his career as an intern in finance before switching to food business. Cullen worked as a

general manager A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of ...

and Area Food Safety Manager at

Sodexo Sodexo (formerly Sodexho Alliance) is a French food services and facilities management company headquartered in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. It has 522,000 employees as of 2023, operates in 55 countries and serves 100 million custome ...

in Boston. In 2010, he relocated to

Washington D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

and worked at Think Food Group as a manager. In 2012, Cullen and Jonas Singer co-founded a pop up coffee shop called Blind Dog Cafe on Florida Avenue. In 2023, he was a speaker at the Good Business Summit and was part of ''Entrepreneurs in Residence'' 2023 held by Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship.

Union Kitchen

In 2012, Cullen co-founded

to partner with food businesses and link the founders of the businesses with resources, capital, and networks needed to grow their businesses. The company started in a 7,300-square-foot space shared commercial cooking space in a Northeast Washington warehouse. The company introduced a food business acceleration process. The accelerator is built out into four phases; Launch, Product Market Fit, Growth, and Scale. In 2022, Cullen established the Union Kitchen Fund 1, a $20M Series A investment fund.

References

External links

Cullen Gilchrist
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gilchrist, Cullen Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Date of birth unknown Dartmouth College alumni American food company founders American chief executives of food industry companies