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Adam Anders is managing partner at Anterra Capital. Adam has over 15 years experience in private equity and venture capital, having entered the sector as a senior operational executive for several venture capital funded businesses. Adam has held senior roles at Rabobank including as a director of Rabobank Private Equity and the managing director of Rabo Ventures.
Read more ›Prior to this Adam was with Ironbridge Capital, a Private Equity house in Sydney, Australia. Earlier in his career Adam worked as a management consultant with Bain & Co and as a commercial lawyer.
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Anne-Valerie Bach is managing partner at Capagro. Anne-Valerie is seasoned venture capital investor with a passion for entrepreneurs and innovation in deep tech including AI. She currently focusses on Food and Agritech companies and loves to boost entrepreneurs in achieving their vision and dreams.
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Jean-Baptiste Bachelerie is managing director of Creadev. Creadev is launched in 2002 and is an evergreen investment company: they believe that shareholders’ timing should match with the entrepreneur’s vision, up to an unlimited amount of time.
Read more ›Previously, Jean-Baptiste was CEO of Avril Oilseeds Division for four years. Before he joined Avril Group he was COO for Louis Dreyfus Commodities Middle East and Africa.
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Dick Boer is member board of directors at Nestlé and former president & CEO and chairman of the management board and executive committee of Ahold Delhaize. Prior to joining Ahold, Dick Boer spent more than 17 years in various retail positions for SHV Holdings N.V. in the Netherlands and abroad and for Unigro N.V.
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Thomas van den Boezem is Business Creation & Investment Manager at EIT Food. He is an expert on growing and funding startups in food & agriculture. Prior to EIT Food he was Program Director and Venture Developer at StartLife, the agrifood startup accelerator co-founded by Wageningen University & Research, and worked as Investment Analyst at Innovation Industries, a high-tech venture capital fund in Amsterdam.
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Pieternel Boogaard is the director Agribusiness, Food and Water of FMO-Dutch Development Bank. Pieternel started with FMO in September 2018 as Director Agribusiness, Food and Water. Agriculture is one of FMOs focus sectors and the current portfolio is more than eur1bn. The department aim is to finance companies across the entire value chain in developing countries from input providers to food companies, from cash crops to permanent crops, livestock, trade and logistics
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Manuela Borella is vice-president plant based acceleration specialized nutrition at Danone. She is a “Danoner” since 2000, has a wealth of experience in brand building and marketing, corporate strategy, leadership and business management. After various marketing and strategy roles, she was appointed strategic planning director working with the Danone Board on the future vision and strategy, through the transition to the first “non-family” CEO of Danone, to find their place within a food and environmental revolution.
Read more ›From here she was appointed general manager of Danone’s pioneering incubator Manifesto Innovation Accelerator (MIA)– mandated to identify and accelerate white space innovation, relevant to the new reality, aligned with Danone’s Manifesto and mission. As GM of MIA Manuela was accountable to lead the team responsible for the entire value chain from vision, strategy and P&L, R&D, procurement to supply chain, marketing and customer care. Critical to this role was capturing insights on innovation process, new marketing, agile ways of working and ability to scale and transition learnings – as well as new business opportunities – into the mainstream Danone businesses.
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Gilles Boumeester is global head of Rabobank’s RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness department. Gilles manages a team of 80 people around the globe. Gilles joined Rabobank in 1997 and held several commercial management roles in Utrecht before he was appointed Regional Head of North-East Asia, based in Hong Kong, in 2007. In 2010 he returned to the Netherlands as global head F&A Coverage.
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Rens Buchwaldt is currently a member of the executive board of Wageningen University & Research, responsible for finance, business & services. Rens Buchwaldt has extensive experience as CFO. From 2006 – 2016, he was an executive director of FloraHolland. First the position of COO and since 2014 as CFO. Before his position at Flora Holland, Rens was CFO at Royal Ahrend from 2002 – 2006. He also held financial management positions in a number of companies in various countries (USA, UK, Sweden).
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Alon Chen is CEO and Co-founder of Tastewise, a consumer intelligence platform for Food Marketing and Product Innovation. Previously, Alan was a Google executive who founded and ran Google Partners program in 27 markets, led Google’s relationship with the World Economic Forum and was Google’s CMO for Israel and Greece. Most recently he worked at Voyager Labs ($100M backing from Oracle and Horizons) incepting and driving their eCommerce division.
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Menno van Dijk is founder and CEO of ScaleUpNation. He worked over twenty years at McKinsey. During this period he has set up McKinsey’s first software business, in joint venture with Nielsen. Five years ago he started THNK, School for Creative Leadership, with offices in different countries and programs for entrepreneurs and big companies on innovation and leadership. From this ScaleUpNation arised, a growth platform for impact scale-ups in Mobility and Sustainability.
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Mark Dijksman is CEO of oneUp. The ambition of oneUp is to be a team of innovators, focused on making businesses future proof and protect them from disruption. They do this by co-creating tech startups with their clients; from ideation to validation and from building to scaling new digital products, leveraging the latest technologies like AI and blockchain.
Read more ›Mark had his first startup in 1998 and had several businesses after that in the Netherlands and abroad. The common denominator of all of his companies was helping his clients to stay ahead of the competition by advise on, and implementation of digital advancements. Mark challenges his clients and shows them a world where you can not only become like frontrunners as Uber and Airbnb, but be even more ambitious and become the disruptor of Uber in their sector.
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Anthony Michael Fadell is the principal at Future Shape, a global investment and advisory firm coaching 200+ startups working on foundational deep technology. Anthony is an American engineer, inventor, designer, entrepreneur, founder, coach, and active investor.
Read more ›Prior to Future Shape Anthony joined Apple Inc. in 2001, served as the Senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple Inc. and oversaw all iPod hardware, software, and accessories development and iPhone hardware, firmware, and accessories development from March 2006 to November 2008. He is also a co-inventor of the iPhone, working on the first three generations of the iPhone. In May 2010, Anthony co-founded Nest Labs, which announced its first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, in October 2011.
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Nicholas Fereday is executive director in Rabobank’s research department in New York, specializing in food and consumer trends. Prior to joining Rabobank, he was a senior economist and VP sales & marketing for LMC International, an economic agri-food consultancy company. Before that he worked for the Natural Resources Institute in the UK, The Department of Agriculture in Papua New Guinea (courtesy of the Overseas Development Institute) and was also a journalist for The Economist Intelligence Unit.
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Edith Feskens is professor Global Nutrition Wageningen University & Research. After a career at the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, Edith joined the Division of Human Nutrition of Wageningen University in 2005. As professor of Nutrition and Metabolic Syndrome she focused on the role of diet and physical activity on cardio-metabolic disease, setting up cohorts and preventive lifestyle interventions.
Read more ›In 2015 she took over the Chair over Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University and since then research and training is concentrated on the role of nutrients, foods and dietary patterns, is physiologically as well as public health oriented, and is targeted both at western and non-western settings.
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Victor is the founder and chairman of FoodShot Global, a new non-profit investment platform to catalyze breakthrough scientific and technological solutions that cultivate a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable food system. He is a well-known thought leader in food system innovation, investment, and sustainable global development, having cofounded S2G Ventures, a leading venture fund investing in farm-to-fork food and agriculture where he built its thesis, team and portfolio.
Read more ›Victor was lead investor on Beyond Meat, Ripple, sweetgreen, Maple Hill Creamery, Apeel Science, Ataraxis and Lavva where he is executive chairman. He co-founded LAUNCH, the innovation accelerator funded by NASA, USAID, US State Department and NIKE. In 2016 he; was named Top 25 deal maker in consumer products by Forbes Magazine.
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Christine Gould is founder and ceo of Thought for Food. She has dedicated her career to making ag innovation more open and collaborative. She created Thought For Food to inspire young people to get involved in developing the solutions their future depends on. Christine holds an MPA in Science & Technology Policy from Columbia University. She sits on the Board of Young Professionals in Ag Development and is a Founding Member of the Ashoka Changemakers League of Intrapreneurs.
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Kirk Haney is the CEO and managing partner of Radicle Growth, a $15M accelerator fund focused on transforming the speed of innovation in agriculture. Under Kirk’s leadership, Radicle secured top tier financial and corporate investors including Finistere Ventures, $150M agtech fund, OurCrowd, $300M funding platform, Bayer Crop Science and DuPont Pioneer. Radicle is partnering with great entrepreneurs to bring disruptive innovation to market while leveraging the platform’s global network to accelerate the development of the new technologies.
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Matilda Ho is founder and managing director at Bits x Bites, China’s pioneer food tech VC investing in early-stage startups tackling global food system challenges. With a mission to shape the future of good food, Bits x Bites inspires and supports the entrepreneurial community to bring new ideas for solving global issues. Matilda is a serial entrepreneur and investor driving to create more sustainable food systems. She also spearheads Yimishiji, a farm-to-table grocery e-commerce platform that has engineered food education and transparency into the entire supply chain and customer experience..
Read more ›As former business designer and consultant at Boston Consulting Group and global design company IDEO, she has worked extensively in the food and beverage sector, using design thinking among other methodologies to simplify complex problems, find product-market fit, and drive sustainable business growth.
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Sascha Israel is a member of the executive leadership team at Bayer Crop Science, a market leader in agriculture with a broad portfolio across seeds & traits, crop protection and digital solutions. Today’s growing population and society’s need to produce more food while preserving our limited natural resources requires innovation and more sustainable solutions for farmers worldwide. Sascha firmly believes that collaboration along the entire value chain, new technologies and digital transformation will be key elements to answer these challenges, and therefore offer both great opportunities but also great potential for disruptive change for the entire industry. Read more ›
Prior to his role, Sascha served as Division Head for the Asia Pacific Region at Bayer Crop Science, and was based in Singapore. Before that he held various positions at McKinsey & Company, including most recently as a Partner and Leader of McKinsey’s Agricultural Service Line for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
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Rens de Jong is a well-known speaker, event host and moderator in the Dutch business sector. He has the ability to increase the energy and enthusiasm in the room by connecting the audience. People in the audience described him as very energetic, witty and well-prepared. In 2013, Quote magazine named Rens one of the most popular event-moderators in The Netherlands. In 2014 he was nominated for “The day’s chairman of the year”. His specializations are innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship and human capital. All in all a great host and moderator for F&A Next.
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Rob Koremans is CEO at Nutreco. He joined Nutreco in 2018. Rob is a doctor of medicine from RSM Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Over the past 30 years, he has held different managerial and executive roles, mainly in the pharmaceutical industry including Serono, Grünenthal and Sanofi-Aventis in The Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic and Switzerland. He was most recently President and CEO Global Specialty Medicines and a member of the Executive Committee at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.
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Rob is a founding partner at AgFunder. AgFunder one of the world’s most active foodtech and agtech venture capital firms. Rob is a Forbes contributor and has also been published in TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, Financial Post, and twice in Nature journals. Rob has been invited to chair, speak, and keynote at many global conferences on food & agriculture, technology, and fintech.
Read more ›In 2014, Forbes Magazine named Rob to their list of ‘Up-And-Comers’, and the White House has extended special invitations to White House-sponsored events. He’s a judge for the National Ag Innovation Prize, the Verizon’s $6M IoT Award for 2015, and sits on the advisory committee of the Ag Innovation Showcase, the world’s first and longest-running AgTech conference.
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As a managing director at Temasek , Anuj is part of the leadership team that makes investments in agri-food companies globally and helps these companies unlock their potential. Anuj strongly believes that science and technology led solutions are the panacea to problems such as undernutrition, malnutrition, water scarcity and climate change.
Read more ›Anuj started his investment career in 2004 as one of the first employees at Temasek’s first overseas office (Mumbai). Since then he has had multiple different roles in the firm including building our Middle East & Africa franchise – an important geopolitical region with exciting prospects but many unsolved problems. He serves on the board of Tana Africa Holdings, a investment company focus in food, consumer sectors.
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Rickard Öste is founder of the oat milk Oatly. Rickard has over 25 years experience of senior research and development in both academic and commercial contexts. His work focus both basic and applied food chemistry and nutrition. He has over 100 publications, including original contributions, reviews and popular science as well as patents that are currently being industrially exploited.
Read more ›Recently he and colleagues with oat interests and relevant scientific knowledge started CropTailor AB, a company devoted to the development of new, unique oat varieties using molecular biology.
Rickard Öste is now leading the development of new products and patents within the food sector and within medical diagnostics from the research company Aventure AB. In addition, he is part time professor at the department of applied nutrition at Lund University in southern Sweden.
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Wilco Schoonderbeek is lead Scale-up & Innovation at Invest NL. For almost two decades he has supported companies manage their risks and capture their potential using technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. He has done this from many sides of the table: corporate, SME, investor or advisor. He has been active in fundraising, has been leading investment opportunities through various stages of the process, including sourcing, initial screening, due-diligence, structuring, execution, closure and portfolio management.
Read more ›After many years of passionate work in public and private sector and a number of investments in disruptive innovations Wilco feels he is uniquely positioned to provide guidance in managing challenges and understand the profound changes that will be ushered by advances in technology.
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Robbert de Vreede is executive vice president Global Foods at Unilever. He describes himself as a passionate business-driven marketer with 20 years of FMCG experience, various marketing and sales roles across a variety of markets across Europe and Africa. He likes to drive change and unleash the energy inside people and businesses, by taking calculated risks so people and businesses can grow faster. He is a strong believer that multi-functional teams deliver better results.
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David Welch is the director of Science and Technology at The Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit organization that promotes innovative alternatives to industrial animal meat, eggs, and dairy products. At GFI, David combines his background in plant biology and regenerative medicine to help companies and academic research institutions accelerate the development of plant-based and clean meat, eggs and dairy products.
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Amir Zaidman is serving as the vice-president of business development of The Kitchen Hub, the first and only FoodTech focused technology incubator in Israel. Amis has close to 20 years of experience in business development and early stage investments in several technology sectors. In his position he provides biz-dev support to the portfolio companies in all aspects of their business. He is also in charge of The Kitchen’s deal-sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities.
Read more ›Prior to joining The Kitchen founding team, Amir held several executive business development positions in the Innovation and Tech sectors. He also takes an active role in promoting a FoodTech community in Israel.