Meet Our Team

Grace Liao

Grace Liao brings a wide range of experience across the food system, including programmatic and operational experience in food banks, community food hubs, and food service and community kitchen settings. She brings an ethnographic lens to her work and is dedicated to building a more equitable, sustainable food system by weaving together stakeholder voices and needs with data-driven analysis. 

Before joining the Food Works Group team, Grace was the Sourcing Manager at Berkeley Food Network, a community-centered food hub working to make healthy, high-quality food more accessible. Grace developed the organization’s food sourcing strategy, centered around strategic investments in responsible food producers and a robust Food Recovery Program, which works with food businesses across the food system to rescue 2 million pounds of food (and counting) from the waste stream. Previously, Grace served as a Sustainability Liaison for Bon Appétit Management Company’s account at Carleton College. Here, she worked with food-service, campus, and community stakeholders to implement a data-driven process to improve sustainable purchasing practices. Prior to this, Grace served as a Lunch Bus Associate with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, to efficiently distribute summer meals to youth across diverse communities in Chicago and fill the persistent summer meal gap. 

Grace holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and sociology from Carleton College. She currently serves as the Source Reduction Specialist on the Alameda County Source Reduction and Recycling Board, working to address root causes of food waste and implement county-wide solutions. She also serves on the Food Recovery Network Student and Alumni Advisory Board, helping the network, which sparked her interest in rescuing food, to deepen student engagement across the US. Grace lives in Berkeley, CA.