Dr. Marcia Schurer is president and founder of Culinary Connections®, an innovative food consulting and training company providing services to retailers, manufacturers, foodservice operators, trade associations and organizations. For more than 30 years, she has forecasted and tracked the major trends in the food industry and successfully adapted those trends to meet the needs of her clients and their customers.  As a recognized leader in the fresh prepared foods arena, including natural, organic, healthy, nutritional, ethnic, and specialty food products, Dr. Schurer has evaluated, developed, and implemented a wide range of ready-to-heat, ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook prepared food products, operations and meal solution programs.

Her clients range from single unit operations to multi-unit, company owned to franchised, privately owned to publicly held on the stock exchange, and start-up to multi-billion dollar size food and beverage companies, in the United States, Canada, and overseas. Because she has developed an extensive network of food industry contacts and can think ‘outside the box’, she has been particularly valued for her ability to identify and develop innovative and unique business opportunities, successful strategies and solutions, and strategic alliances and partnerships for her clients.  

Dr. Schurer is a noted speaker and seminar leader for more than 40 major conferences and workshops, author of dozens of trade magazine articles, frequently interviewed for trade and consumer publications, co-author of the textbook Meat and Fish Management and author of the book FitDelicious™: Lose the Pounds, Not the Taste; Food Intelligence Tools™ for Healthy and Delicious Eating, designed to help consumers lose weight, maintain that weight loss, and be healthy for a lifetime.  

Her experience also includes conducting seminars for every level of business, from employees to managers and executives. Prior to starting Culinary Connections, she was Director of Specialty Foods/Foodservice for Purity Supreme Supermarkets and a professor of hotel and restaurant administration at Boston University, University of New Hampshire and Northern Arizona University.  

Dr. Schurer holds a Doctorate in Education and Media Technology from Boston University, a Master’s Degree in Professional Studies from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, a Bachelor of Science Degree in Human Development, Nutrition, and Education from Pennsylvania State University and a Certificat Avancé from La Varenne École de Cuisine cooking school in Paris.

Her clients have included Stop & Shop Supermarkets, Tops Markets, Inc., Felpausch Food Centers, Harris Teeter Supermarkets, Baker's Supermarkets, Pueblo Supermarkets, Supermarket of Cherry Hill, Quick Chek, Tyson Foods, Armour Swift-Ekrich, Tinsley Foods (UK), Boston Market and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

"A facilitator of change – dynamic, motivational, innovative."