Before social media had a name, Sue Zelickson built a human network from restaurant tables, radio microphones and the conviction that the right introduction could change a career. Zelickson, the Twin Cities food broadcaster, writer and community organizer who spent more than five decades bringing people together, died on August 7, 2026, at her Golden Valley home at age 91.

Her gift was not simply knowing a room. It was noticing who in that room needed to know someone else, then making sure they met. New chefs learned quickly that an introduction to Sue Z. could connect them to the wider food community. Boards wanted her judgment, fundraisers wanted her energy and young professionals found an advocate who did more than offer encouragement. In a 2023 profile, she reduced that work to one cheerful sentence: "It's fun when you connect people," she told The Minnesota Star Tribune.

The connections had consequences. Chef Gavin Kaysen said Zelickson's persistence helped bring national attention to a region that had often been overlooked. After her death, he told The Minnesota Star Tribune that without her determined championship of Twin Cities food, the scene would not be what it became. "She was just so one of one," he said. Cookbook author Zoë François remembered an even more personal form of advocacy: Zelickson held her hands, looked her in the eyes and told her to charge toward her career, refuse timidity and not wait for another person to supply success.

Born Sue Zipperman on September 13, 1934, she grew up in south Minneapolis and worked at her father's drugstore and soda fountain. She graduated from Washburn High School, spent two years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed a degree in early childhood education at the University of Minnesota. She taught in Minneapolis and for two years in Beaufort, South Carolina, where her husband, dermatologist Dr. Alvin Zelickson, was serving in the U.S. Navy. The couple were married for 64 years before his death in 2021.

Food entered her professional life gradually as she moved between substitute teaching assignments. She credited a grandmother's exceptional home cooking with shaping her appetite for the subject, while joking that her own answer was to support restaurants instead. By the 1970s, a television appearance on KSTP had opened a path into broadcasting. At WCCO Radio she became the host of "Food for Thought," a role she held for 25 years. Her voice also reached readers through Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and Minnesota Monthly, and she helped launch Minnesota Monthly's Food and Wine Experience.

The honors followed the work. A WCCO holiday special earned her the 2005 James Beard Award for best local radio show. She entered the Minnesota Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2022, the International Association of Culinary Professionals named Zelickson a Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, placing her service to the culinary world alongside a career that had crossed radio, print, events and philanthropy.

Yet some of her most durable work happened away from a byline or studio. In 1993 she founded Women Who Really Cook, a professional network for women in food and hospitality. Its purpose was practical: share information, surface job opportunities, offer mentoring and help members move their ideas forward. Three decades later, François and other women in the field described Zelickson as the person who urged them past hesitation and made sure their work was seen.

She repeatedly turned food into a fundraising tool. Zelickson created a Kids Cafe at Perspectives Family Center and directed proceeds from a cookie mix toward the program. She edited charity cookbooks, with sales raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the American Cancer Society by 2014. She also gave her large cookbook collection to Saint Paul College's culinary arts program, moving the books from her shelves into the hands of students.

Zelickson understood that a community needed occasions to recognize itself. In 2011 she helped create the Charlie Awards, named for the Minneapolis landmark Charlie's Cafe Exceptionale. The ceremony gave chefs, servers, bartenders, restaurateurs and other hospitality workers a stage for the generosity and skill they usually put into other people's celebrations. The awards joined the Food and Wine Experience and her countless introductions as another piece of civic infrastructure built around a shared meal.

Her public presence remained vivid late in life. More than 400 people attended her 90th birthday celebration, where she received a proclamation of Sue Zelickson Day. The scale of the gathering fit a woman whose career had been measured not only in broadcasts, columns and awards, but also in the people she had pulled into conversation with one another.

Zelickson was survived by her sons, Barry Zelickson and Dr. Brian Zelickson, and their families. Across the Twin Cities, the network she assembled continues in the women who found professional footing through Women Who Really Cook, the students using culinary books she collected, the hospitality workers celebrated by the Charlie Awards and the chefs whose names reached a wider audience because Sue Z. made a call or an introduction.