Thomas Donohoe Digital Marketing Guru & CMO
Cuisine Solutions
The past year has been full of surprises for Thomas Donohoe, a best-selling author and nationally recognized expert in digital marketing. In April, Donohoe was named chief marketing officer for Cuisine Solutions, the global leader in pioneering the sous vide cooking technique. A serial entrepreneur, Donohoe had also just sold his company, Level Agency, intending to take some time off to spend time with his family, but this exciting, newly created position derailed those plans.
“I have been an entrepreneur for over a decade, and I was planning on taking a long summer break and spending time with my daughters,” Donohoe says. The day after selling his marketing agency, Cuisine Solutions CEO Felipe Hasselmann, a longtime friend, called and said, “How about you don’t take a vacation and come work with me instead?”
He was familiar with the company, having worked with them as a client, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. “I already loved what they’ve done, where they’re going, and their products. And frankly, I am one of the best at what I do, and it would be difficult for my friend, who’s an amazing CEO and running an amazing company, to find a better CMO option.”
Sous Vide
Cuisine Solutions, the pioneer in the sous vide slow-cooking technique, is one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of whose products you interact with daily. Its foods are used in over 22,000 restaurants globally, from Michelin-starred dining temples to Starbucks, and at over 6,000 retailers, as well as by the world’s top hotels and airlines. Cuisine Solutions also supplies major institutional entities including healthcare facilities, cruise ships, schools and the military. The company has massive manufacturing plants and test kitchens in the U.S., France, the Middle East, and Thailand.
Chef Thomas Keller: The French Laundry
Even Thomas Keller of Per Se and The French Laundry partners with Cuisine Solutions, as he mentions the company in his latest book. “The clients are the best of the best, and my job as chief marketing officer is to share those partnerships with other prospective partners and clients around the world,” says Donohoe.
The Delta Force, SEAL Team 6 of the Culinary World
Since joining the company full time, Donohoe has often found himself astounded at the innovation he’s witnessed. One division, the Culinary Research & Education Academy (CREA), consists of food scientists. “They invent new foods,” he says. “It’s crazy, and it’s wonderful. They do what we would call R&D.” This division also trains other chefs in the sous vide method. Many, many Michelin-star restaurants and hundreds of other elite restaurants in America send their new apprentices and sous chefs to this team for training. Donohoe describes it as the “black-ops, Delta Force, SEAL Team 6 of the culinary world,” a part of the company’s culture with a focus on quality, ingenuity, and innovation.
The Chefs
He’s also amazed at how many of the thousands of employees in executive positions throughout Cuisine Solutions are classically trained chefs. “They’re not businesspeople, they’re not accountants or salespeople or marketers. They’re chefs. They put these people in charge of big things, and so what happens is this giant company still cares about how good the food is. And that’s the reason this company is the best and will be in ten years; it’s in their DNA.” mycuisinesolutions.com
Bestselling book
Donohoe expects to publish an updated version of his 2019 bestselling book, The CEO’s Digital Marketing Playbook, which received critical acclaim. Its success, he believes, is in offering concrete solutions while other marketing books just talk about strategy in a general way. “Anybody that wants to turn marketing into a customer and profit-generating activity, you want to read something and then know what to do. You want to say, great, I’ve got seven things to do this week, and if I do those seven things correctly, I’ll probably make more money. Well, I wrote the book that has that.” He plans updates as the industry evolves.
Children; photography; Patrick McMullan
In his spare time, Donohoe devotes his energy to his two daughters, ages 6 and 8. “They are my north, my south, my east, my west. They’re perfect.”
Another of his passions is photography, with which he fell in love in his teens. While working in New York as a consultant in digital advertising during its infancy back in the early 2000s, Donohoe took a short career detour, venturing into photography professionally as an assistant to Patrick McMullan. “That was the most fun I’ve ever had, and I love this man to this day,” he says. “I love photography. I still do it. I’ve had some gallery pieces, but I do it primarily for my enjoyment. I was good, but I was never great, and there is no worse place to be good versus great than New York City.
tomdonohoe.com
