Great food and great people have been the hallmark of Caroline Skinner’s career. A passionate champion of high-growth, employee-centric workplaces, Caroline serves as Chief Operating Officer of Tupelo Honey Hospitality Corporation. She joined the company as part of the initial senior leadership team in 2013. In her nine-year tenure, she has been responsible for Tupelo Honey’s workforce expansion efforts, founding and leading its human resources and training teams and growing the brand from two locations and less than 100 employees to 18 locations and nearly 15,200 employees. Caroline has helped the company attain numerous awards and accolades for its innovative employment practices, including the 2016 LEARN ROI Award for most engaging training content and the 2020 OnCon’s Top 25 Human Resources Executive. Tupelo Honey has been named a Best Place to Work by Business Intelligence Group and has also been singled out as one of the Top 50 Emerging Restaurants Brands by FSR magazine multiple times. Notable and industry leading programs such as the company’s Fair Start Wage; Honeypot; and Biscuits-For-A-Cause programs have also received publicity.
Beginning in 2019 Caroline assumed leadership of the company’s operations team. With an initial focus on improving the company’s new store opening processes the company was able to achieve three consecutive successful openings, reducing opening costs by 100 percent and attaining normalized profit levels within less than two months. In 2020 Caroline helped implement the company’s ‘survive to thrive’ model across all restaurant locations.
