Meet Our Executive Team
Are you a hospitality professional interested in expanding your company’s reach?
Our team is available for strategic planning, operational solutions across multiple venues, on-site and virtual professional training, and start-up support. Our mission is to help you attract and serve the growing population of plant-forward and plant-curious guests, working within your unique needs and goals. We help you clarify your vision and create a customized action plan to streamline your F&B and customer service to make for a more hospitable experience for both your guests and employees. We work with restaurants and hotels that want to add plant based options, create separate vegan menus, or transition to completely plant based food service.
Meredith Marin
Founder & CEO of Vegan Hospitality
Meredith Marin is a Hospitality Consultant and Industry Leader specializing in Vegan Hospitality and Tourism. Beginning in 2017, Meredith worked with restaurants, hotels, food service businesses and chefs in the tourism-focused Caribbean to boost business by training staff to attract and serve vegan guests. In 2019, credited to her extensive work on the island, Aruba was recognized as the most vegan friendly island in the Caribbean, attracting guests specifically for their vegan culinary scene.
Meredith has a master’s in social work and experience in the public health sector, supporting communities, schools, and restaurants in creating and implementing wellness intervention. She has worked in the U.S. to transform school lunch rooms, including upgrading point of service technology, food safety protocol, meal planning and food sourcing, worked with chefs to create community health campaigns for their restaurants, and led countless food demos and nutrition trainings for businesses, government offices and non-profit organizations. At the university level, Meredith has taught courses on advocacy, psychology, and community empowerment.
Meredith's vegan hospitality expertise has been featured numerous times in the media including on television, podcasts, print magazines distributed on major airlines and in hotel lobbies, as well as on popular vegan media sites such as Happy Cow and Plant Based News. Meredith currently lives in South Florida with her husband and two children (yes, her family is vegan too!)
Hayley Cooper
Chief operating officer
Hayley Cooper is a Certified Vegan Hospitality Consultant and Industry Leader with 23 years of professional experience in hospitality management. She is based in Greater Kruger in South Africa where she co-manages a luxury 5 star safari lodge. She is also the founder & CEO of Wild Dreams, a successful & well-established hospitality business offering recruitment, training & consulting services all over Africa. She came on board as COO for Vegan Hospitality to support the rising demand of global inquiries from new and established hospitality businesses seeking plant forward solutions.
Hayley is frequently featured in the media both in print and on podcasts sharing her expertise about hospitality, tourism and veganism. She is also the author of ''Your Vegan Bestie,'' an e-book to help people transition to a vegan lifestyle. Her enthusiasm for veganism and sustainability stems from a love for rehabilitating wild animals, which is how she made the connection to this way of life. She prides herself on providing a professional and personalized service in everything that she does and loves sharing her passion with others.
Sophie Downie
director of partnerships
Sophie Downie is a Certified Vegan Hospitality Consultant and Professional Business Advisor based in Bordeaux, France. With 8 years of customer service experience, including restaurant employment and serving as a business advisor for a major Europe-based corporation, Sophie is an expert at providing tailored high quality solutions for our clients. Managing our outreach and training in Europe, Sophie supports our clients in clarifying their vision for expanded plant based service, and works with our executive team to create customized action plans for facilitating confident service to vegan and plant-forward guests.
Sophie is the founder of Vegan Friendly Bordeaux, her local vegan consultancy in France, where her mission is to help the French Hospitality Industry continue their traditional level of classical excellence and culinary leadership while catering to the growing vegan market. Sophie has organised and facilitated vegan cooking workshops at Ikea Bordeaux, created training content for French Universities, and provided trainings and strategy sessions to multiple restaurants and chefs. She has a degree in Applied Foreign Languages and speaks fluent English and French.