Drives innovation in the food industry as CEO of EIT Food, has a track record of successfully building and transforming businesses.
Marie Brueser
Corporate Venture Manager at EIT Food
Kari Tronsmo
Open Innovation Leader at Danone
Food chemist and innovation professional in the European food industry. Having held various roles spanning from research, product development, innovation leadership and category management, for >20 years in 4 countries, I’m now in charge of Open Innovation at Danone and actively involved with EIT Food. Working from within on the farm-to-fork transformation towards a sustainable food system, I leverage my expertise in food technology and innovation leadership to seed and foster partnerships between corporates, startups and academics.
Sonia Huppert
IFF - Global Innovation Marketing Leader, RE-IMAGINE PROTEIN®
Sonia Huppert is Global Innovation Marketing Leader, RE-IMAGINE PROTEIN® at IFF, leading the industry roadmap for growth in alternative proteins. She has deep insight into and broad experience in food technology, product development, business development and strategic marketing. She has more than 25 years of experience in the food and beverage industry, turning ideation into successful innovation that is consumer-oriented and customer-driven.
Anna-Teresa Geß
Senior Innovation Architect at NEDGEX
NEDGEX is the digital incubator unit of the NETZSCH Group. In her role, she is building up the ecosystem for the NEDGEX Hub in Munich, driving innovative ideas and leveraging knowledge from new technologies.
Anna-Teresa studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität München. She combines the technical knowledge with experience in developing and managing new digital products and business models in various industries. She is passionate about startup culture and new rising markets such as the alternative proteins.
Marie Asano
Partner at ECBF
Marie Asano is currently a Partner at the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund, a specialized fund investing in growth-stage companies active in ag-tech, nutrition, industrial biotech and packaging. At ECBF Marie is the Partner leading the nutrition and food tech vertical. Previously she was at High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), a German-based seed fund where she lead early stage investments active in the areas of chemistry, climate tech, animal health and life sciences. Before beginning her professional career, Marie completed her PhD in Chemistry at the universities of Liège and Bordeaux after which she then obtained an MBA at the Collège des Ingénieurs.
Jamie Crummie
Co-founder at Too Good to Go
Jamie Crummie trained as a lawyer, having studied a LLB in Law at Leeds University and a master’s in Human Rights Law LLM at Queen’s Mary before pursuing his mission of fighting food waste. He is the co-founder of Too Good To Go, the world’s largest marketplace for surplus food.
Ludovic Reysset
Head of Alternative.s (EU plant-based platform) at SparkFood
Ludovic has worked 25 years for Danone in different roles such as General Manager Portugal, Global VP Sales, Sales Director in Japan, Sales Director in Italy, Head of Sales Brazil,…
Now Ludovic is leading Sparkfood Alternative.s for SONAE with the aim to create a European supplier of healthy, delicious & sustainable food products.
Imran Afzal
Open Innovation Lead EU
Imran is part of the Open Innovation team at Mondelez.
He helped shape the EIT Food Mission Net Zero final report.
Imran is passionate about start-up/corporate collaborations and believes they play an essential role in decarbonising the food system.
Mario Augusto Maia
CFA
An agri-food and sustainability investing pioneer, Mario has nearly 2 decades of global investment experience across agricultural and food ingredient systems. Investing across multiple funding stages within private and public listed markets as both an institutional and corporate investor, Mario has held senior and executive positions at Novozymes, where he built and led their CVC arm, CFSGAM, where he helped establish and run one of the world’s first global agribusiness funds, and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, where he headed the Equities Research Division for Agri & Food, Chemicals, Packaging and ESG. A dual Australian and Brazilian National, Mario lives in Copenhagen where he is the Managing Partner of Cogent Venture Partners / Continuity.
David Taylor
Head of EMEA Sales and Business Development
David is an award-winning sustainable supply chain consultant specialising in sustainable agriculture and supply optimization through digital transformation. David joined Agritask in early 2023 as their Head of EMEA, helping food and beverage businesses leverage their unique influence and scale to drive environmental, social, and commercial sustainability.