Okanagan College Expands Chef Ned Bell’s Role in New $61.3-Million Culinary Centre

Field Notes
Written By Kate Colley

This spring, Okanagan College expanded Ned’s role in its new Centre for Food, Wine and Tourism, retaining Hatch Hospitality for a year-long mandate focused on restaurant and event-space concept design and implementation.

Working with the provost, dean, faculty, students, and industry partners, Ned is helping shape how the Centre will look, feel, and operate. The work spans its student-run restaurant, event spaces, culinary labs, wine-tasting facilities, academic programming, sustainable procurement, and industry partnerships.

Ned brings the perspective of a chef, operator, sustainability advocate, and Okanagan local. He has built and led acclaimed restaurants, worked across hospitality, health care, agriculture, and education, and spent decades connecting food to the people and places behind it.


Through Hatch, that experience is being translated into the practical systems behind the vision, from menus, equipment, and purchasing to partnerships, programming, and brand experience.

This is long-term systems work: helping an institution turn a major capital investment into a place that reflects the Okanagan and prepares students for the industry they will inherit.

Kate Colley

Kate Colley has worked across nearly every format hospitality offers — destinations, resorts, hotels, restaurants, wineries, and major events — and she brings all of it to every engagement. She led the host property communications strategy for Canada’s G7 Leaders’ Summit at Kananaskis and spent a decade as Director of Communications for Four Seasons Vancouver and Whistler. She has also been an operator — co-owning Naramata Inn, tripling revenue during a pandemic, and doing the kinds of risky, exciting things that look obvious in hindsight. She is a strategist, a marketer, an operator, and an advisor — and oftentimes the person who walks into your business, spots the gap between where you are and where you could be, and helps close it.

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