INA, Ill. (January 26, 2024)—Brittney Horn’s (Class of 2012) journey started at Rend Lake College’s Culinary Arts program. After graduating, she had dreams of being a famous chef in a big city. Little did she know that healthcare would be a career path for her, or the new heights that she would achieve in the culinary industry.
Featured in photo: Brittney Horn, Corporate Executive Chef at HHS.
Horn is proud to call herself the first female Corporate Executive Chef employed at HHS.
HHS is a contracts service company that works with hundreds of different businesses across the country. They have contracts with government organizations, resorts, and senior living, to name a few. She works in the Healthcare division, specifically in Culinary & Nutrition Services (CNS).
Before starting with HHS, she never considered healthcare as a career option. After graduating from RLC, she moved to Chicago to pursue her dreams of being a big-city chef. She worked two full-time restaurant jobs. Her journey to success was paved with multiple different leadership roles, from working as a line cook to front-of-the-house management.
While she was working in Chicago, a friend from culinary school reached out to her about his new job at HHS. He said she should come work for them. She turned him down at first because she was happy at the restaurant she was running at the time. But still, he was insistent, and after two year of trying to convince her, Horn finally made the move to HHS.
She started in 2017 and since working there, she has been promoted four times, including the promotion to her current position. She feels that she has really had a chance to grow with the company. She is able to apply her skills as a chef and a leader in her role at HHS by developing programs, writing recipes, and providing quality food and care to the communities they serve. “Food is some of the best medicine,” she said.
“In my role, we have to be very adaptive, we have to shift gears frequently, and having that creative freedom while I was [at RLC] helped drive that for me,” she said.
She feels that starting at RLC was one of the best decisions she could have made because the education helped prepare her for her career.
“I think there’s a lot of value in programs like these...” Horn said. “It’s important for people to know that you don’t have to go to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) to get a quality culinary education. You might not be getting the same exact education here that you would get there, but you get a really good, strong base. And as long as you’re willing to work with that and build on it…for me it’s worked out very well.”
She also expressed that in a lot of her classes, they didn’t just teach her what to do and how to do it, they taught her the why. They learned the science behind cooking, and she always thought was a valuable skill to have in her education. She carries that principle not only in her cooking, but also her leadership.
When asked what advice she would give to current RLC students in the Culinary Arts program, she said, “Make sure people know what you want. I’ve always made sure to express what my expectations for my career were going to be. Solicit feedback and don’t take it personally, take it as a lesson. We all make mistakes, mistakes happen, it’s what you do with it that affects the situation the most.”
She wants students to know it’s important to keep an open-mind, and that sometimes their original plan might not pan out the way they had hoped, but better things are sure to come their way if they keep their options open.
For instance, Horn never thought she would end up working in healthcare, but she gets to work with food every day and provide nourishment to those in need. And before she started at RLC, she never thought she’d end up being a chef, but now she can call herself the first female Corporate Executive Chef at HHS.
She originally started school majoring in something else entirely, but it didn’t work out so she dropped out her first semester to figure out what she wanted to do. One night, she and her college roommate were sitting at the table, eating a meal that Horn had prepared when she said, “I want to do something and I don’t know what it is…and [my roommate] said, go to culinary school. It had never dawned on me before that moment and it is one of the best decisions of my life.”
The advice she would give to her younger self who didn’t know what direction life was taking her would be, “Do it exactly the same. You’re on the right path.”
If you're ready to start your culinary journey at RLC, visit rlc.edu/culinaryarts or click the link below.