Mitu Zenaye built her marketing career on a decision most 16-year-olds never have to make. When she arrived in the U.S. from Ethiopia as an emancipated teenager, she took a job at a Bertucci’s pizza restaurant for one reason: it guaranteed she’d always have food while she finished high school. She had no way of knowing that decision would eventually put her in charge of marketing for a regional foodservice distributor — or that the same instinct for reading people that got her through those early years would become the foundation of her entire approach to the job.
Zenaye is Marketing Manager at FoodPRO Corporation, a family- and employee-owned foodservice distributor based in Frederick, Maryland, serving restaurants, schools, and institutions across a six-state mid-Atlantic footprint stretching through Maryland, Northern Virginia, West Virginia, D.C., and Pennsylvania. She was named a 2023 – IFDA Rising Star, for her work in the distribution space.
A Career Nobody Planned For Her
Growing up in a middle-to-upper-class Ethiopian family, Zenaye wasn’t allowed in the kitchen — household staff handled the cooking. It wasn’t until she started as a pizza cook that she discovered she had a genuine passion for food, one that eventually earned her a scholarship to Stratford University’s culinary program. Before foodservice, however, her dream was graphic design and television production. She spent much of her high school years working with her school’s radio and TV station and hoped to pursue those fields in college. While the path to the production side of her passion took longer than expected, she ultimately found a way to blend her love of food with storytelling and creative production in her marketing career today.
When Johnson & Wales later offered her a path to a bachelor’s degree, she turned it down for a management role at Passion Food Hospitality instead, choosing hands-on experience over a diploma. For a family of scholars — her father was an economist who did market research for Coca-Cola, and her mother, a Business Major who worked as a shipping officer for a US-based company — the choice was almost incomprehensible. “I’m going to prove to you guys that this is a career,” she says of that decision. That determination became the throughline of her professional life and remains a driving force behind her work today.
That decision launched a career that grew throughout the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region. Along the way, Zenaye helped open the National Harbor location of Rosa Mexicano and held management roles with organizations including Great American Restaurants, Landry’s, and the highly regarded Belle Haven Country Club. She also had the opportunity to work alongside respected culinary figures, including acclaimed Washington, D.C., chef Roberto Donna.
Segment First
Ask Zenaye what she does differently, and she doesn’t point to a channel or a campaign — she points to a discipline. “Know your market and market directly to who you sell to,” she says. FoodPRO’s customer base spans rural operators, city restaurants, school districts, and prisons, a spread wide enough to scatter most marketing efforts. Zenaye’s answer is to resist the broad play entirely: if a product fits one buyer segment, it gets marketed to that segment, not blasted out to everyone. “I believe in direct marketing to your exact buyer,” she says. “Segmenting is the biggest thing.”
Feet in Everything
Zenaye doesn’t confine herself to the marketing department, and she’ll say so herself. “I don’t look at my job as just marketing in this building. I put my feet in everything,” she says — whether that’s joining a company committee, flagging something as small as a flag hung wrong, or riding along with delivery drivers to see the business from the customer’s back door. Having joined FoodPRO as a Territory Manager in 2019, she moved into the Marketing Department at the beginning of 2021, bringing with her an operational perspective that’s shaped how she approaches the role. “Seeing every aspect of the business kind of helps make everything cohesive,” she explains.
That commitment to learning and collaboration extends beyond FoodPRO. Since 2025, Zenaye has served on the UniPro Marketing Committee, working alongside marketing leaders across the distribution industry to share ideas, best practices, and emerging strategies.
Proving the Unprovable
The hardest part of the job, Zenaye says, is defending work that doesn’t show up cleanly in a spreadsheet. At a recent UniPro conference, a colleague pushed back on the value of staying visible on social media. But conversations like that are exactly why she’s spent years building better ways to measure marketing’s impact. By embedding unique tracking links into posts and ads, she can show exactly who clicked, who engaged more than once, and where those interactions led. The result is a clearer picture of how brand visibility turns into customer engagement and opportunity. It’s her answer to a familiar challenge: making a creative discipline legible to a numbers-driven business.
Know Your Why
Zenaye’s advice to anyone entering foodservice starts with a single question she still asks herself: “Why food?” Once someone can answer that, she says, the rest follows — whether the path leads to the kitchen, supply chain, or day-to-day operations. She’s equally direct about the industry’s reputation problem, pushing back on the idea that foodservice is a stopover job for college kids earning cash. “There is longevity and there is a career in this industry,” she says. “It’s not just a passing-through kind of industry.”
Mitu built her career by reading people first and everything else second — and it shows in a marketing approach that treats every buyer as someone worth actually knowing.