CHICAGO, March,12, 2026 - Jane Street, then an early-stage investment firm, had to wait a year before Sally Minier agreed to be interviewed for the facilities management position it was struggling to fill. Even then, Minier recalls, she said yes largely to see if a newcomer to the starched world of finance would hire a Wall St. expat peddling her own line of baked goods on the internet at the time.
Jane Street was so smitten with Minier’s career track that it agreed to let her keep Sweet Sally’s Bakeshop as a side hustle if she’d take the job of supervising the financial institution’s foodservices and other employee amenities. Minier said yes, adding to a resume that already listed stints as financial analyst, luxury hotelier, contract-services liaison, foodservices supervisor, wholesale baker, and entrepreneur.
“I liked the people a lot,” she recalls of her introduction to Jane Street. “And it was a chance to do more than foodservice,” her focus at Lehman Bros. before the financial behemoth went bankrupt in the Great Recession and nudged Minier into the bakery business. “It was running all the components of the business.”
That was 14 years ago. Today, as Head of Workplace Strategies for Jane Street, Minier draws on her diverse professional experiences to plan and develop new facilities for what is now an employer of 3,200 people. The company had just 250 on the payroll when she started.
"We've had double digit growth every year since I've been there,” says Minier, this year’s Silver Plate winner in the Business & Industry/Foodservice Management category. Her job is to ensure the company’s office capacity and foodservice options keep up, looking years down the road.
The task has her traveling around the globe to oversee the development of new facilities in Hong Kong, Singapore, and London. She’s also overseeing the overhaul of four floors of a Jane Street facility in New York City, where the company now has more than a million square feet of office space.
It’s the company’s policy to feed its employees for free, with Minier working with in-house architects and contracted outside management firms to ensure the capacity is there.
Minier says she draws on the diverse aspects of her career to keep Jane Street’s facilities relevant and differentiated. Having worked in finance herself as a young college grad, she’s aware of employees’ need to get back to their desks quickly after grabbing lunch. “I understand the culture,” she says.
Minier got a graduate-level course in hospitality during her time with Ritz-Carlton, working under the chain’s first president, Horst Schultz, a legend in the service world.
She eventually had to throw in the napkin on Sweet Sally’s Bakeshop, but she kept it running for her first four years with Jane Street, supplying New York clients like The Plaza hotel and foodservice facilities similar to the ones she had run at Lehman.
“I'd work my day job at Jane Street and then at 6:00 go to the bakery,” she recalls. “I would package and ship out products and then leave at about 10:00 at night to go back home and start over again.”
Her specialties were treats she remembered from her New Jersey girlhood, like black-and-white cookies and rugelach.
Being an entrepreneur put a sharper edge on her financial acumen. “You have to understand how money is made and lost and be able to crunch the financials,” Minier says. "You need to understand that part of the business, not just the hospitality side of it.”
Minier stresses that her move into a strategic foodservice role would not have been as easy had she spent less time in the operational aspects.
“I've had all these years of experience and now I’m able to bring it to the next level,” she says.
“People tell me it's a dream job,” says Minier. “I kind of feel the same way.“
As Managing Editor for IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, Romeo is responsible for generating the group's news and feature content. He brings more than 40 years of experience in covering restaurants to the position.