Julia Shanks

Julia works with food and agricultural entrepreneurs and organizations as a business coach, strategist, and educator. She brings a broad range of professional experiences to her clients, from pilot to chef to serial entrepreneur. She combines the practicality of an accountant with the creativity of a chef.

Through her consulting practice, Julia helps food and farm businesses maximize profits and streamline operations through business planning, feasibility studies and operational audits. She provides financial management trainings to farmers and business advisors who work with farmers. Julia shares her tools and knowledge more broadly in her second book, The Farmer’s Office. This book is a practical hands-on guide to help farmers think like entrepreneurs so they can build financially sustainable businesses.

Julia’s career started at the FAA as an aviation analyst and quickly took a swerve to the culinary arts. After more than 10 years of professional cooking, Julia got her MBA, became a college professor of accounting and continued her ventures in entrepreneurship.

Julia launched her first business, Interactive Cuisine, in 1997. Through this innovative service, she provided informal cooking lessons in the comfort of customers’ home kitchens. The business grew to include corporate team-building through cooking, using cooking as a model to improve teamwork and collaboration. She garnered local and national press, including accolades from Bon Appétit and the Boston Globe. In 2006, she brought her business to Fidelity and helped them launch Sebastians Interactive Kitchen (now Action Kitchen).

Julia’s second business, CSA Cookbooks created custom cookbooks for small farmers seeking a way to build loyalty with their customers by offering this unique value-added product. Her books have been reviewed in the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Taste of the Seacoast, and Growing for Market Magazine. The Farmers Market Cookbook, Julia’s first direct-to-market book co-authored with Brett Grohsgal, was cited as a reference in Michelle Obama’s American Grown.

Julia received her professional training as a chef at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, her BA from Hampshire College and an MBA Magna Cum Laude from Babson College.