This month we are excited to feature Holly Baumgart, VP of Strategy at Sargento Foods. Holly has been involved with the UWEBC for about six years and is proud to serve as a member of the UWEBC Advisory Board!
Holly has been seeing new trends emerge this year in the food industry. A big area she sees activity in is new mergers and acquisitions along with partnerships between different organizations. She shared that creating partnerships has been a huge success for Sargento.
Alongside her work at Sargento, Holly also recently received her Master’s degree in sustainability from Harvard University! She is passionate about understanding how sustainability impacts not only business but the communities that we serve. She thinks diving deeper into this topic can be extremely beneficial and would love to see the UWEBC have an event in the future focused on sustainability.
Holly loves that the UWEBC unites both large and small progressive companies to share business insights, ideas, and best practices in an engaging way. She loves that UWEBC gives her a comprehensive view of business in the state of WI, as it is nice to understand who’s in our community, and UWEBC has provided a way to help her foster deeper relationships with those located in our area.
Here’s a helpful tip for getting the most out of your UWEBC membership from Holly’s experience: Creating leadership meetings specifically around UWEBC events has been helpful to increase awareness of the different learning opportunities UWEBC has to offer. When her team gets together to debrief, she occasionally sets up a networking dinner afterward to talk about key takeaways from an event and ways they can incorporate it back into their everyday activities.
When Holly was asked about her favorite UWEBC event, she answered, “for sure the Annual Conference” because of how beneficial it has been for her and her team to hear real-world examples they heard that are applicable to their company. She also loves the outstanding speakers; whether they are speakers from an external perspective or a company that has members sharing their insights, she finds them all to be high quality and motivational.
We thank Holly for her great participation and contribution to UWEBC this past year. We can’t wait to see more great collaborations in the near future!
Published July 6, 2022
Dylan Kopf and Jenny Zhang, Marketing Student Assistants