Caroline Skinner has been a featured speaker at the NextGen Restaurant Summit across multiple years, bringing operational insight and a people-first perspective to one of the restaurant industry's premier leadership events.
NextGen Restaurant Summit — September 2025
At the 2025 summit, Caroline is scheduled to speak on the panel "Building Brand Resilience — Strategies for Navigating Economic Shifts," exploring how restaurant operators can adapt and thrive in an uncertain economic environment. The session covers pricing models and menu strategy in inflationary markets, supply chain diversification and vendor relationship management, customer loyalty and retention through value-driven experience, and operational discipline as a resilience framework.
The panel reflects themes Caroline has championed throughout her career — the idea that operational excellence and people investment are not competing priorities, but reinforcing strategies that create durable competitive advantage.
A Track Record of Operational Resilience
During her tenure as COO at Tupelo Honey, Caroline led the brand through some of the most disruptive periods in modern restaurant history. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced dining room closures, she helped implement the company's "survive to thrive" model — a framework for maintaining team cohesion, reducing costs without sacrificing culture, and positioning the brand for accelerated growth on the other side.
That experience informed her approach to the post-pandemic landscape: investing in workforce stability, building flexible operational systems, and making strategic technology decisions that serve the team as much as the guest.
From HR to the C-Suite
Caroline's path to restaurant leadership was unconventional. She joined Tupelo Honey in 2013 as part of the initial senior leadership team, building the human resources and training infrastructure from the ground up. Under her leadership, the company grew from 2 locations with fewer than 100 employees to over 20 locations with thousands of team members.
Her founding and leadership of the HR and training teams earned Tupelo Honey the 2016 LEARN ROI Award for most engaging training content and contributed to the company's recognition as one of the Best Places to Work by the Business Intelligence Group.
In 2019, Caroline transitioned to operations leadership, immediately improving new store opening processes — achieving three consecutive successful openings, reducing opening costs by 100%, and reaching normalized profit levels within two months.
Speaking History
Caroline has been a returning speaker at the NextGen Restaurant Summit (2022, 2023, 2025) and has also presented at the QSR Evolution Conference (2023, 2024), Olo industry webinars, and Branded Hospitality Media panels. Her sessions consistently focus on the intersection of operations, culture, and scalable growth.
Learn more about the NextGen Restaurant Summit at www.nextgenrestaurantsummit.com/speaker/caroline-skinner
This article was originally published in NextGen Restaurant Summit on November 15, 2024. View the original article