food-science
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Thomas Bowman
Thomas Bowman is a James Beard-nominated chef turned food scientist and the co-founder of Eclipse Foods, an Alameda, California company building molecule-for-molecule plant-based replacements for dairy. After cooking and staging at restaurants that together held 16 Michelin stars and leading product development at JUST (formerly Hampton Creek), Bowman set out to recreate the taste and texture of dairy from non-GMO plants like oats, corn, and potatoes. Eclipse launched in 2019 out of Y Combinator, chose ice cream as its flagship, and has raised roughly $96 million to date, reaching retailers, foodservice, and direct-to-consumer channels.
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.
Laura Katz
Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Marty Kolewe
Marty Kolewe is a chemical engineer turned food-tech founder and the CEO of Foodberry, a Boston company that reverse-engineers fruit skin to make edible, plant-based coatings that keep fresh food fresh without plastic. Trained at Johns Hopkins, UMass Amherst, and MIT's Langer Lab, he traded a career in drug delivery for one in snacks, betting that the science behind a peach's peel could reshape how the world packages and eats food. Under his leadership Foodberry has amassed 20-plus patents, closed a $15 million Series A, and lined up partners from a dairy-free ice-cream maker to the global owner of Babybel.
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.
Jeffrey Dietrich
Jeffrey Dietrich is a bioengineer-turned-coffee-founder who built Rarebird around paraxanthine, the molecule your body actually makes when it metabolizes caffeine. After a PhD at UC Berkeley in Jay Keasling's lab and nearly a decade co-founding and running R&D at the industrial biotech company Lygos, Dietrich turned his own dwindling caffeine tolerance into a company. Rarebird sells decaffeinated specialty coffee infused with lab-grade paraxanthine, promising the lift of coffee without the jitters, crash, or ruined sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, and two NSF grants, the company holds U.S. patents on the process and won the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product award.
Adam Ragusea
Adam Ragusea is an American YouTuber, food writer, and former public-radio reporter who turned a kitchen-counter pizza video into a 2.6-million-subscriber cooking empire. A former journalism professor at Mercer University, he treats recipes the way a beat reporter treats a city hall meeting: with curiosity, skepticism, and a willingness to season the cutting board instead of the steak.
Nathaniel Chu
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.