President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Lancaster Colony
Search every verified David Ciesinski interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Ciesinski, president and CEO of Lancaster Colony (parent company of T. Marzetti), spoke at Carnegie Mellon University's W.L. Mellon Speaker Series on January 17, 2025. He discussed his leadership approach, including rebuilding the company's leadership team since joining in 2016 and implementing a "better food company growth plan" that he said nearly doubled the business and delivered top quartile financial results. Ciesinski described a ransomware attack on July 20, 2019, that shut down the company's systems for about six months, requiring the scrapping of over a thousand computers and a move to a cloud-based environment, which he said later helped the company respond to COVID-19. He also outlined the company's innovation process, including developing a Nashville hot sauce for KFC that he said tripled demand forecasts. In a 2022 video, Ciesinski and Director of Safety Karl Sommer discussed the company's safety record, noting reductions in injury rates over five to six years and a goal of achieving a total recordable incident rate under 1.0, which they described as "world class." Ciesinski highlighted the Chatham Village facility's pursuit of OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) Star designation, the highest level of safety recognition, and said the company planned to apply lessons from that program to other locations. He emphasized that safety improvements included automating packaging and palletizing activities.
“Since joining the company in 2016, I have rebuilt the leadership team and led the development and implementation of the company's better food company growth plan, which has nearly doubled the size of the business and consistently delivered top quartile financial results.”
“If you want to build a tall building, you need a big, wide, strong foundation. Lateral moves afford you the ability to build a foundation that's broader and deeper, helping you understand how the business works more completely so you can make better decisions.”
“We're in the people business; we just so happen to make food. If you want to help a business grow, you have to figure out how to help the people in that business grow as well. Engaging people authentically unlocks magic and leads to the most rewarding moments in a career.”
“Culture begins with you—that's the little culture. You can't control whether your boss is a jerk, but you can control whether the people that work for you have a boss that's a jerk. Trust, transparency, honesty, collaboration, performance, then results—that's the layered cake of culture.”
“We invest time in offsites to improve team performance because every time you bring a new person in, the dynamics change. Our core values include respect for the dignity of every person, courage to speak your mind, humility to remain open-minded, and hunger to be driven to improve.”
“Our innovation process involves working closely with major restaurants, developing and prototyping dozens of flavor ideas, consumer testing, and scaling successful products to thousands of restaurants. For example, the Nashville hot sauce we developed for KFC was a world beater and demand tripled forecasts.”
“We replaced our old ERP system from 1996 with SAP in the cloud, enabling better forecasting, production scheduling, and automation to improve manufacturing cost-effectiveness. This platform now allows us to consider more advanced digital tools.”
“On July 20, 2019, we were hit by a ransomware malware that shut down our systems completely, impacting production, communication, and billing. It took about six months to fully recover, including scrapping over a thousand computers and moving to a cloud-based environment, which later helped us respond effectively to CO...”
“Succession planning is critical; you must constantly assess if your team has the right capacity and capabilities to meet evolving business needs, while ensuring cultural fit with values like respect and courage. Transparency with the board and readiness to hand over leadership when the time is right are essential fiduc...”
“Enterprise risk management is vital, including system redundancies, manufacturing and supply chain resilience. We meet monthly with CFO, CEO, supply chain head, and general counsel to review risks like employee safety, food safety, production resiliency, cyber threats, and supplier risks, because you're only as strong...”
“One of the accomplishments I'm most proud of is the progress that we've made with our total incident rate, our TIR. There are recordable rates of dropped substantially in the last five, six years. We're approaching world class which we would consider getting under 1.0, which has been our goal for some time.”
“Each year we've seen reductions in our injury experience which has translated into better performance with our recordable rate. So the metrics are there to confirm the successes we've had.”
“We've taken a very aggressive ergonomics approach lately, automating some of our sharing activities on floor packaging and palletizing. That's helped dramatically.”
“Our Chatham Village facility is pursuing OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program, the VPP, specifically the Star program which is the highest level of safety networks that can be recognized. There are only about 1500 companies that won this award nationwide throughout the year.”
“We hope to take lessons learned from the VPP program and apply them to other locations and continue to drive down injury experience at other locations via the VPP program.”
A prominent C-suite executive, David Ciesinski (MSIA '96) is a forward-thinking leader who measures his success by more than ...
T. Marzetti's Director of Safety Karl Sommer and CEO Dave Ciesinski discuss our world-class safety! Our total recordable incident ...
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