food-and-beverage
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Theodore Gailas and the Hundred-Cookie Hour
A childhood rivalry produced a tiny Astoria cookie shop. Theodore Gailas turned the weekly menu, the waiting line and even the smell from the oven into a brand people knew how to follow.
Barak Bar-Cohen Put the Factory on Wheels
The former Bai operator turned a stubborn variety-pack problem into a mobile manufacturing company. Its name carries a clue from Mars, and its machines are designed to arrive where the work already is.
Robert Wheatley Put Trust Back on the Label
The Chicago strategist has spent a career asking food and lifestyle brands to prove what they promise. His answer keeps returning to the same scarce ingredient: trust.
Dave Ritterbush and the Fine Art of Inheriting the Future
He learned brand-building in the ice-cream aisle, helped take a protein company to a $1 billion sale, and now runs Califia Farms with a deceptively simple rule: inherit the past, then build for what comes next.
John Maguire and the Long Way Back to the Oven
He studied the science of bread, learned scale at Panera, tried to make Friendly's friendly again, and returned to his bakery roots at Levain. John Maguire's career is a lesson in fixing what customers can see - and what companies prefer not to.
Mickey Du Is Teaching the Office Coffee Machine Some Taste
A chance cup in a Hayes Valley alley gave Mickey Du a lifelong standard for coffee. Two decades later, BrewBird is his attempt to encode that feeling into a 60-second workplace ritual.
Candy Schibli Put an Engineer’s Ear to the Coffee Roaster
She left international development for a one-kilo roaster in her great-grandmother’s Virginia house. A decade later, Candy Schibli is still treating every batch as an experiment in flavor, fairness and human connection.
Lorena Cantarovici Put a Family Recipe on a Flight Path
She arrived in Denver with a banker’s instinct for systems and a cook’s memory of home. Fifteen years later, the empanada has carried her mother’s name from a garage kitchen to an airport gate.
Dan Kenary Bet the Brewery on the People Who Built It
Harpoon began as three friends chasing the local beer culture they had found in Europe. Nearly four decades later, Kenary's most revealing product is not an IPA but a durable idea: let the people doing the work own the future.
Nathan Rosenstock Put the Office Snack Shelf on a Spreadsheet
A borrowed Cadillac, a free kegerator and a near-death pandemic pivot became a national workplace food operation. Nathan Rosenstock's useful trick was learning that the snack is only the visible part of the system.
Caroline MacDougall Dreamed Up a Coffee With No Coffee in It
A dream supplied the name. Twenty years of apprenticeship supplied the nerve. Caroline MacDougall turned roasted roots, fruits and seeds into a new beverage ritual - then spent three decades teaching shoppers what to call it.
Chaz Flexman Is Teaching the Grocery Aisle to Show Its Work
After years moving between venture capital, connected hardware and consumer brands, Chaz Flexman found his most useful dataset in the supermarket. At Starday Foods, every snack is also a test of whether software can make product development less dependent on guesswork.
Andrew Abraham Built Orgain by Listening to the Shelf
Before Orgain reached more than 100,000 stores, its founder answered the phones, improvised an org chart with family names and watched an early batch turn stubbornly solid. His useful talent was never pretending the first plan was sacred.
Jiachun Li Built a Boba Shop Like an Engineer - Then Added a Bunny
She left mechanical engineering for milk tea, turned store operations into a systems problem, and learned that the smallest object in the cup could carry the biggest part of the brand.
Stephan Czypionka Is Measuring Dumplings and Cataloging Palm Trees
The Austrian marketer has spent a career translating taste across borders. At CJ Foods, his playbook pairs hard measurement with cultural curiosity - the same instinct behind a side project cataloging hundreds of palm species.
Alon Chen
A family WhatsApp thread about Friday dinner became Tastewise, an AI system built to tell food companies what people want before the focus group comes back.
Sean Goldsmith
Sean Goldsmith is the co-founder and CEO of The Zero Proof, an Atlanta-based platform for premium non-alcoholic wine, beer, and spirits. What started in 2019 as a review blog he ran with childhood friend Trevor Wolfe after both took a break from drinking has grown into one of the largest curators and retailers in the adult non-alcoholic category, with 400+ products, owned brands like Lapo's and Saint Viviana, and a Series A backed by Asahi.
Andrea Johnston
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Kelly Thompson
Kelly Thompson is a food industry executive with more than 30 years of experience who led Incredo (formerly DouxMatok), the sugar-reduction technology company behind Incredo Sugar. Trained as a food engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she built her career in research, development and quality at Kraft Foods, WhiteWave Foods and Continental Mills before joining Incredo in 2022 to head North America. She rose to Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Executive Officer, steering the commercialization of a real-cane-sugar ingredient that lets manufacturers cut sugar by up to half while keeping the taste.
Matt Beaton
Matt Beaton is CEO of Mike's Hot Honey, the Brooklyn-based chili-infused honey brand he built with college friend Mike Kurtz. He joined in 2015 when the company was pulling in $100,000 a year, and grew a one-SKU business into a roughly $40 million operation stocked in more than 30,000 retail stores and 3,000 restaurants. He came out of brand-management jobs at Wrigley and PUR Water and an MBA from Kellogg, and now runs the classic case study for what happens when you refuse to launch a second product.
Sai Alluri
Sai Alluri is the co-founder and CEO of Momos, a Singapore-and-San Diego-based software platform that helps multi-location restaurant brands manage customer feedback, reviews, marketing, and reputation with AI-powered workflows. He was an early Uber employee, helped launch Uber Eats across Asia-Pacific, then built and ran GrabKitchen - Southeast Asia's largest cloud kitchen network - before starting Momos in 2020 with Andrew Liu after watching favorite restaurants shut during COVID. Momos raised a $10M Series A in September 2024, bringing total funding to about $16.5-17M.
Christina Diiorio
Christina Diiorio is the founder and CEO of The Yay Company, the Charlottesville-based startup behind Yay Lunch, a modern K-12 school lunch program that partners with local caterers and chefs to deliver fresh, kid-approved meals directly to schools at no cost to the school. A former food editor at Goop, MindBodyGreen and Zagat and a Georgetown graduate, she launched Yay in 2018 after her own son came home hungry and unhappy with his cafeteria options. She has raised roughly $15.5M+ across Series A and later rounds from investors including Valor Siren Ventures, Reach Capital and FJ Labs, growing the company past 200% year-over-year and into markets from Atlanta to New York.
Liang Crow
Liang Crow is listed in business-contact directories as Chief Executive Officer of Juicero, the San Francisco cold-press juice company that became a defining parable of Silicon Valley hardware ambition. Juicero built a Wi-Fi-connected countertop press paired with proprietary single-serving produce packs, raised roughly $120 million from marquee investors, and priced its first machine at $699. In April 2017 Bloomberg reporters showed the packs could be squeezed by hand, the company suspended sales that September, and it was defunct by December. Crow's name is attached to the CEO chair in Apollo and similar records; beyond that role listing, little independent public biography is verifiable.
Jarrod Jordan
Jarrod Jordan is a consumer-goods and technology marketing executive now serving as Chief Executive Officer of Rarebird, Inc., the specialty coffee company built around Px (paraxanthine). A Columbia University graduate based in New York, he built his reputation running data-driven, omnichannel marketing at scale: as Chief Marketing Officer of the smart-earbud pioneer Bragi, as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at consumer brands company Iovate Health Sciences, and as a founding member and Executive Vice President of Thuzio, the marketing SaaS startup he helped grow from four people to nearly eighty across five cities. A frequent conference keynoter and on-camera business analyst, Jordan has become known for turning quantitative rigor into brand momentum.
Alex Abelin
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.
Rosa Li
Rosa Li is the founder and CEO of wildwonder, the sparkling beverage brand she built around the herbal tonics her grandmother brewed in Beijing. A Stanford MBA and former private equity investor, she traded Wall Street spreadsheets for a homemade carbonation rig made from a beer keg, launched in 2020, and landed a deal with DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on Shark Tank in 2023. wildwonder now reaches 3,000-plus retailers across 40 states and has sold millions of cans.
Youngwon Lee
Youngwon Lee is the founder and CEO of Dokkaebier, an Oakland-based craft brewery built around Asian ingredients and Korean folklore. After more than a decade in the wine and spirits trade across Seoul and California, he launched Dokkaebier in February 2020, named for the mischievous shape-shifting spirits of Korean myth. He brews beers like a kimchi sour and a yuzu blonde, and set out to change an industry where only about 2% of professionals identify as Asian American. In three years he released 40-plus beers, reached 400-plus retailers, and in 2023 acquired Oakland's Federation Brewing to take over its taproom near Jack London Square.
Amanda Luke
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.
Jennie Ripps
Jennie Ripps is the founder and CEO of Owl's Brew, the boozy-tea company she co-built with Maria Littlefield to put real fruit, tea and botanicals back into ready-to-drink cocktails. A certified tea sommelier who started in publishing, she hand-blends every flavor base in her own kitchen before it ever reaches production. Owl's Brew has earned 40+ tasting awards and reaches shelves at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target and Total Wine, plus stadiums from Yankee Stadium to TD Garden. Beyond the bottle, Ripps champions women in the alcohol industry through the Wise Women Collective and brings readers together with the Boozy Book Club.
Kerry Song
Kerry Song is the founder and CEO of Abbot's (formerly Abbot's Butcher), a Costa Mesa, California plant-based meat company she launched in 2017. A Princeton economics graduate who once worked in finance at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and spent five years as a brand strategist for Tony Robbins, she built Abbot's around a strict clean-label promise: no gluten, no soy, no gums, no synthetic flavors, no preservatives. The brand became the only Whole30 Approved plant-based meat and grew from a Venice farmers-market table into a category leader stocked in thousands of retailers including Sprouts, Publix and Target.