Dave Ciesinski remembers the grass and the dirt. When he describes the appeal of running a business, he reaches back to childhood baseball: friends on either side, a score to improve, the pleasure of doing something together. The memory is wonderfully ordinary. It also explains rather more about his approach to management than a photograph of an executive standing beside a quarterly earnings chart ever could.
There are plenty of numbers in his working life. He is president, chief executive and a director of The Marzetti Company, the Ohio food business formerly called Lancaster Colony. Its fiscal 2026 consolidated net sales reached $1.93 billion. Its products turn up in refrigerators, freezers and restaurant kitchens. But Ciesinski’s account of why the work matters begins with the other people on the field.
“I view business like a big version of that,” he said of baseball. A new product reaching the market, and the faces of the people who made it happen, offered the sort of memory he expected to keep. A quarterly result had rather less chance of surviving the years. For somebody paid to deliver those results, that is a revealing order of importance.
A uniform before the familiar labels
Before the food brands came West Point and the Army. Ciesinski graduated from the United States Military Academy and served in Iraq during the first Gulf War, earning a Bronze Star Medal. Later came a master’s degree in marketing and finance at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, where he belongs to the MSIA class of 1996.
His subsequent work placed him inside businesses whose names required little introduction. Over 13 years at H.J. Heinz, he held responsibilities spanning strategy, marketing, and mergers and acquisitions. At Kraft, he became executive vice president and president of the Meal Solutions division, with a portfolio including A1, Velveeta, Good Seasons and Jell-O. Few business-school case studies are quite so likely to be sitting in the reader’s cupboard.
That background matters because the job combines two kinds of attention. A brand lives in someone’s preferences and habits. A factory lives by schedules, yields and equipment. The executive who works across both has to understand why a customer reaches for a product and how the business will reliably make the next million of them.
The dinner that had to wait
The route to Marzetti included a dinner with Jay Gerlach and Bruce Rosa, then leaders of Lancaster Colony and its food subsidiary. They got on well. Timing, however, was less obliging: Ciesinski had a noncompete agreement with Kraft. They stayed in touch. Even a promising succession plan sometimes has to wait for the paperwork to catch up with the conversation.
In April 2016, he joined as Lancaster Colony’s president and chief operating officer and president of T. Marzetti. Rosa was retiring after 41 years with the company. The appointment brought Ciesinski into an organization with long institutional memories, where taking charge also meant understanding what other people had spent decades building.
He became chief executive and joined the board on July 1, 2017. Gerlach remained executive chairman. In announcing the succession, Gerlach pointed to Ciesinski’s work strengthening management, completing the Angelic Bakehouse acquisition and developing the growth strategy. The transition gave him time inside the business before the final handover, rather than requiring him to learn the organization from the chief executive’s chair.
Why he chose a comparative adjective
Ciesinski has explained the thinking behind the company’s phrase, “The Better Food Company.” Better gives you a comparison: where you began and where you ended. It asks for evidence of movement. There is something usefully inconvenient about that. An adjective that requires a starting point also requires somebody to check the finish.
His 2021 discussion of purpose at work included a particularly earthy example. A bakery was producing enough scrap to send substantial quantities of food to hog farms. Employees helped reduce the waste and improve the factory’s profitability. In his telling, the disappointed constituency was the hog farmers. It is a management anecdote with the rare advantage of containing actual pigs.
The broader argument is practical. People who understand what the business is trying to accomplish can help identify where effort and material are being lost. A waste bin becomes information. So does a recurring production problem. Purpose earns its place when employees can connect it to a decision they make during an ordinary shift.
“a moral obligation to uphold the dignity of every single employee”Dave Ciesinski, speaking at Carnegie Mellon
In his public account of leadership, accomplishing the mission sits alongside responsibility for the people doing it. That makes the standard demanding in both directions. The company must perform, and the experience of working there must matter. A pleasant speech about teamwork cannot settle either question. The work of managing begins after the speech, when competing demands arrive together.
The unglamorous machinery of trust
One early operational step was the introduction of Integrated Business Planning at Marzetti. The approach brings the organization’s plans into a shared process, helping it adjust as circumstances change. In a business joining customer demand to manufacturing capacity, coordinating those decisions is consequential. A sales opportunity and an available production line need to meet on the same calendar.
The appeal of such work can be difficult to capture in a photograph. Nobody frames a well-timed planning meeting. Yet a growing food company depends on these arrangements: how its functions communicate, when commitments become visible, and whether the organization can change course before a small mismatch becomes an expensive one. Ciesinski’s career in brands is accompanied by this interest in the systems behind them.
His emphasis on people also reaches beyond his own company. Essential Utilities announced his appointment to its board in July 2021. Chairman and chief executive Christopher Franklin highlighted his experience in branding, growth and acquisitions. The invitation placed a packaged-food operator in another business dependent on infrastructure and sustained execution, offering a different setting for the same questions about investment and organizational capability.
A company takes the name on the bottle
In June 2025, Lancaster Colony legally changed its name to The Marzetti Company. Trading under MZTI began on July 1. The new name reached back to Teresa Marzetti’s Columbus restaurant, opened in 1896, and to the dressings that became associated with it. A public company was choosing to introduce itself through a food name customers could recognize.
The change also made the company’s identity easier to understand. Lancaster Colony had sold its last non-food businesses by 2014. Ciesinski inherited a business already focused on food; the rebrand made that focus explicit. It is worth keeping that sequence straight. His chapter builds on decisions made before his arrival.
By then, restaurant licensing was another part of the company’s identity. Its agreements included Olive Garden dressings, Chick-fil-A sauces, and Texas Roadhouse rolls. These products carry an interesting promise: a familiar restaurant experience can travel home. For the manufacturer, delivering that promise requires a working relationship between the name on the package and the operation behind it.
The next recipe costs $400 million
The next addition was a brand with a different route to recognition. On May 1, 2026, Marzetti completed its $400 million purchase of Bachan’s. The Japanese-American sauce business had launched in 2019, built by founder Justin Gill around a recipe passed down through his family. Its name refers to his grandmother.
Bachan’s generated approximately $87 million in net sales in calendar 2025. Marzetti financed the purchase with cash on hand and a $200 million term loan. These are meaningful commitments, accompanied by a specific ambition: broaden distribution, continue product development and explore additional channels and related categories. Those were plans, rather than results already delivered.
Bachan’s purchase price · completed May 1, 2026
The acquisition presents a familiar question in a new bottle. A family recipe gains access to a larger organization’s distribution and manufacturing capabilities. The acquiring company gains a brand whose appeal was developed elsewhere. Preserving the reasons people wanted it while making it more widely available is the assignment. Ownership changes at closing; consumer affection needs to be earned again with each purchase.
Ciesinski’s personal life has its own substantial team: he and his wife, Trish, have six children and live in Columbus. In November 2024, he returned to Carnegie Mellon to discuss his career with students. The distance from graduate student to visiting chief executive was measured in decades of decisions, relationships and responsibility.
His story keeps returning to the same practical test. Can the organization improve, and can the people inside it grow with the work? The baseball memory supplies an appealing beginning. The factories, partnerships and newly acquired sauce brand supply the ongoing examination. The score is public. What happens to the team along the way is the part he has chosen to keep talking about.