Team Spotlight

The team is small but mighty. It’s led by Ambika Senthilvel, Technology & Menu Planning Senior Manager, and includes Teja Adapa, Tyler Lowry, Xeng Yang and Suman Patel. Ambika also oversees the menu team, which works closely with the tagger team. The menu team members include our former Kitchen Manager Brandon Porter and Annapoorna Meyyappan.

Ambika Senthilvel, Technology & Menu Planning Senior Manager

Ambika started with CKC 6 years ago as the Menu Planning & Technology Coordinator. Today, she oversees the tagging process, both the back-end technology that supports it and the front-end operations. She also works on menu planning with Annapoorna and Brandon, is the IT go-to person for CKC and acts as a liaison between CKC and technology vendors.

Before CKC, Ambika juggled between her home country of India and three states in the U.S. (South Carolina, Michigan and now Minnesota). She worked in the telecom auditing field, was a teacher and operated a blog about children’s books after both her two boys, now 16 and 13, started school full time.

Ambika and her family like to spend time outdoors in summers and watch movies with buckets of popcorn in the winters. She likes to cook, listen to music and cook while listening to music and is a “bookaholic” who lives in the parallel universes of fiction books.

Tyler Lowry, Prep Tag Coordinator

Tyler joined CKC in October 2022, after working years in the restaurant/ hospitality industry, in positions from dishwasher to General Manager. Most recently, he was a sous-chef at an independent, assisted and memory care facility. He had found the work-family life balance difficult in the hospitality industry and had always been interested in a tech-related job.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw this opportunity and how perfectly it aligned with my experience and interest in a tech field!” Tyler said.

As Prep Tag Coordinator, Tyler verifies clients’ daily meal counts for accuracy and investigates when meal counts haven’t been submitted due to oversight or school being closed. He then imports meal counts into Tagger, goes through each prep category (breakfast, snack, hot food, cold food, etc.) and verifies clients’ entries line by line against their menus and Food Production Reports. After everything is confirmed, Tyler generates both the tags for Xeng to print and the prep totals the kitchen uses to pull ingredients and prepare meals. He also creates the drivers’ daily checklists. Tyler is the primary contact for clients’ changes or requests, whether meal count changes, requests for ingredient swaps, canceling or adjusting orders, etc. He also manages pizza orders, creates inventory estimations for upcoming menus for the procurement team and manages the back end of recipes and ingredients in Tagger.

Outside of work, Tyler, in his words, “has a fantastic wife and amazing 6-year-old son!” During summer, he enjoys fishing with his grandpa and exploring parks and nature centers with his family. He likes ice fishing and sledding and building snow forts with his son in the winter. Year round, he plays video games, which has turned into a great bonding experience with his son. The two would spend the entire day playing Minecraft if it were up to his son!

Teja Adapa, Database & Business Analyst

Working from India, Teja maintains the tagger system while those of us in Minnesota are sleeping. Her primary responsibilities include updating tagger based on requests from clients or CKC managers and upgrading tagger to complete new tasks that were done manually before. For example, tagger was expanded about 6 months ago to generate inventory estimation reports a week ahead of a menu day, helping to minimize inventory shortages and substitutions.

Aside from tagger duties, Teja helps Ambika manage enhancements to the CKC website portal to make it more helpful to clients as information and needs change. She also serves as a back-up on menu planning.

Teja joined CKC in mid-2019, after learning of the job opening from Ambika. After moving to the U.S. in 2015 for her husband’s work and obtaining her work permit, Teja worked seasonally as test scorer. In India, she was a software engineer for an IT company.

In 2021, Teja and her husband returned to India, where they currently live with her in-laws (multi-generational households are common in India). The couple doesn’t have children yet. In her spare time, Teja takes a break from technology by watching movies, playing board games and painting.

Suman Patel, Technology Coordinator

Suman joined the tagger team in February 2023 to support the back-end tagger technology and update tagger. She’s currently being trained by Teja. Before CKC, Suman worked in India as a software developer for a product development company.

In her free time, Suman enjoys gardening, reading and cooking as well as taking her kids to the playground, cycling or hiking.

Xeng Yang, Prep Tag Coordinator

Xeng joined CKC at the start of January 2023, after responding to the job post on Indeed. He is responsible for entering the meals that schools will be getting for a certain date based on the Food Production Reports generated by Ambika and then creating physical tags that are applied to all the pans of food delivered to schools.

Before CKC, Xeng did GIS work for the State of Minnesota.

An outdoors person, Xeng likes activities including hiking, fishing and playing volleyball in the summer. In the winter, he hibernates indoors until it’s warm again.      

Brandon Porter, Recipe Development & Menu Coordinator

Brandon joined CKC in August 2019, after serving as executive chef at Dellwood Country Club and food and beverage manager at a family entertainment and event center. He was drawn to CKC because it offered him a better quality of life with a predictable schedule, freeing up his nights and weekends to spend with his growing family. His responsibilities include testing and creating new recipes, and consulting on menu creation. Outside of work he and his wife are raising two kids, ages 7 and 2. Together, they enjoy camping, fishing, skiing, snowmobiling, and of course, cooking.

Annapoorna Meyyappan, Product and Data Analyst

Annapoorna is a self-taught Data Analyst and Data Science practitioner who specializes in Python programming.  Working with Ambika, Annapoorna discusses the optimal meal combinations for clients based on federal nutritional requirements and specific requests, creates the monthly promotional menus for CKC’s clients and uploads them to the client portal.

When Annapoorna was looking for a work-from-home opportunity in 2022, Ambika referred her to CKC. Her skills were a perfect match for what CKC was seeking at the time and Annapoorna became a happy CKC employee as of July 1, 2022.

Annapoorna has a loving family, anchored by the “pillar” of her life, her warm and caring husband, Muthu, who is a Vice President at JP Morgan/Chase in Bangalore. Together, they have a sweet, cute 9-year-old daughter, Bharathi Muthu, who is in 4th grade.

Outside of work, she is a puzzle addict, spends her time solving devilish Sudokus, and loves to travel to admire nature. She is an amateur photographer who is interested in exploring life with her DSLR camera.