KK&P is pleased to announce that Maxwell Bernstein has joined the company as a staff consultant. Max has been vital to the work of KK&P since he first started working as an independent research assistant in 2020.

“The food system is so enormous and complicated, and also immediate and deeply personal at the same time,” said Max. “As a member of the KK&P team I feel it’s important that we take stock of that complexity in every aspect of our work, and am grateful to be part of a company that is striving to do just that, and to use our position to help enhance equity throughout food system in the process.”

Max brings nearly a decade of experience in the food industry to KK&P. He spent eight years as a cook, bread baker, and business operations manager at independently-owned restaurants and bakeries in both Seattle and New York before going back to school, earning his Master’s degree in Urban Planning at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU in 2020. 

“I was working on the business operations side for a large restaurant group in Brooklyn, and we were working with GrowNYC on the regional grains project and it introduced me to a systems-level approach for farm to table,” said Max. “I wanted to do more policy work, and that led me to more school.”

At Wagner, he studied the political, social, and physical forces which shape urban and regional food networks, the policy levers available to local governments to advance equity within these systems, and the impacts these interventions have on the ways city dwellers eat and work. During his time at Wagner, Max interned at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, performed research at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy, and worked as an intern and fellow with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Operations. 

Food systems planning and strategy is a relatively niche field: there aren’t many firms that do what KK&P does. When Max learned about KK&P while at Wagner and later saw the opening for a research assistant, he “saw all the things [he] wanted to be doing,” he said, and quickly applied. Since joining the company, Max has been working on collective purchasing and advocacy work for a coalition of NYC food pantries, NYC’s Good Food Purchasing program, and more.

The KK&P team has been thrilled to welcome Max aboard, and we’re very much looking forward to future projects (and staff gatherings) with him on the team!