food-manufacturing
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Beryl Stafford and the Wonderful Imprudence of the $14 Reorder
A rainy afternoon, a teenage baker and one tiny coffee-shop reorder gave Beryl Stafford a way forward. She spent the next two decades proving that a homemade-looking oat bar could survive the machinery of national scale.
Mark Lodge and the Cold Art of Keeping Fresh Food Moving
For three decades, the British-born operator has worked behind the grocery shelf, turning perishable food into a repeatable system. At Gotham Greens, his old obsession with time, temperature and movement has found a greenhouse-sized stage.
Taylor Andersen and the Business Behind the Plate
His career runs from the dining room to the production floor. In Utah's food-business corridor, Taylor Andersen has made an operating life out of the details customers are never supposed to notice.
Nai Kanell Learned Marketing by Knocking on Doors - Now She Opens Them for Others
A first-generation refugee once walked into office buildings asking for an internship. Two decades later, the SafetyChain CMO is still solving unfamiliar problems - with data, candor and a preference for outcomes in which everyone gets a slice.
Gardar Stefansson Put Stevia in the Fine Print - and Jam on 10,000 Shelves
An expiring pile of sweetener became a kitchen experiment, then a pantry brand. The useful part of Gardar Stefansson's story is how often progress arrived after he admitted the first idea was wrong.
Lawrence Toscano Put the Payroll Before the Rebuild
When a five-alarm fire tore through Barchemy's main plant, Larry Toscano kept every employee paid. The decision explains more about his Donora chocolate business than any ingredient list could.
Christine Apple Drew No Blueprint for Grön - Then Built It to Last
An architect with a $50,000 bet turned a basement chocolate experiment into a nine-state brand. Eleven years later, selling Grön revealed a distinctly founder-like instinct: knowing when the thing you built needs a larger frame.
Paul Lapadat Built a Seven-Brand Dessert Company from a Starbucks Napkin
A finance-trained food executive spotted a simple contradiction: people wanted desserts that felt handmade, while retailers and restaurants needed them made at scale. His answer became a seven-brand bakery platform built on real ingredients, operational discipline and an insistence that the product comes first.
Jay Jandrain
Jay Jandrain is the president and CEO of Butterball, the largest turkey producer in the United States. A Cornell-trained food scientist who joined Butterball in 2002 running product R&D, he climbed through sales, strategy and operations to take the top job in 2018. In 2025 he was elected chairman of the National Turkey Federation, and each November he becomes the country's most quoted voice on the price and preparation of the Thanksgiving bird.
Jim Collins
Jim Collins is the Chief Executive Officer of Basic American Foods, a 90-plus-year-old, family-owned food manufacturer headquartered in Walnut Creek, California. He stepped into the CEO seat in 2023 after serving as the company's CFO. Before BAF, his career wound through PwC, Foster's Group in Australia, Robert Mondavi, Beringer, and a stint at telecom-era start-ups Yipes and Spinway. A Chico State business graduate, he runs a roughly $625M revenue, 1,300-employee enterprise best known for instant mashed potatoes, dehydrated onion and garlic, beans and foodservice ingredients sold under brands like Idaho Spuds, Potato Pearls, Santiago, and Golden Grill.
Rajat Bhageria
Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based company building AI-enabled robotic systems for flexible food assembly automation. After founding accessibility tech startup ThirdEye (acquired 2017) and co-founding pre-seed VC fund Prototype Capital, Bhageria launched Chef Robotics in 2019 to tackle the labor crisis in food manufacturing. The company has deployed robots across 12+ facilities in the US, Canada, and Europe, completing over 100 million food servings as of April 2026, backed by $72.7M in total funding. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Bhageria is also a published scientist, author, and prolific writer with bylines in Forbes, TechCrunch, and HuffPost.