Amelia Shuja
Amelia Shuja founded Tula Consulting, a woman-owned business, in 2022 when realizing that her expertise in the culinary industry was desired by varying types of corporate food service operations across the United States. This became a reality as she partnered with other influential consultants in the hospitality industry. The pandemic gave way to setting her entrepreneurial spirit in motion after departing Palo Alto Networks, where she had been Manager of Business Services and Programs. This position was responsible for managing all workplace retention programs, such as food service, a robust pantry snack program, fitness/wellness programs, and company events. When Amelia started, Palo Alto Networks was beginning construction on their 1M square foot campus. Amelia designed and implemented 18 café concepts and managed 27 different pantry snack areas, an award-winning Executive Briefing Center with gourmet food service, a state-of-the-art fitness center, and 11 designated event spaces. There were 5,000 employees at the Santa Clara campus and another 3,000 globally. She also managed the food service and pantry programs for office locations across the US.
Before that time, she had a unique role with Bon Appetit Management Company in San Francisco, CA, where she built food service programs for Uber, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. She also oversaw a baking and pastry program servicing 14 clients. In this role, she built and operated the only commissary that the company had ever had, managing employees in 8 different buildings throughout the city. This required a mastery of logistics and a unique management style as she had 5 Executive Chefs sharing one kitchen with 110 employees divided across teams focusing on their respective clients. The commissary was a success and fulfilled the client's needs as they each built and designed their onsite food service operations.
She stepped into the corporate food service scene right out of culinary school, where she started cooking for a small tech start-up Zynga, an online social gaming company in San Francisco, CA. She started cooking lunch for 18 people and was innovative in the space, ending up with a team of 115 employees, serving more than 7,000 meals daily. This team hugely impacted the company culture via the immersive culinary and wellness programs she built. Her work at Zynga was featured in the Wall Street Journal before she designed the most extensive production kitchen in the city of San Francisco in 2011.
Amelia’s love of hospitality, centered around bringing people together over delicious food, was cultivated in her teen years. With a small social family that gathered often, she became enamored with all that goes into hosting an event. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and spending several years in Guatemala and Brazil as a young child, she has an appreciation for diverse cuisine. She worked at various restaurants in her early career, from chili parlors to fine dining steakhouses. She decided to pursue a culinary degree and graduated with honors from Le Cordon Bleau, San Francisco, CA, in 2008.
Amelia is a result-driven professional; she enjoys taking on new challenges and providing sustainable solutions while taking great care to deliver her customers the highest level of hospitality.