food-systems
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Cliff Pollard Put the Missing Middle on the Menu
He started with ten cattle, borrowed coolers and a promise to pay. A decade later, the Oakland founder is still betting that the difficult part of better meat is the part worth owning.
Jake Muise Built a Food Company That Hopes to Sell Less
A volleyball scholarship, a lucky dorm assignment and a 19-year fixation on axis deer led Jake Muise to an unusual business: one whose ecological success makes every harvest harder.
Julia Collins
Julia Collins is the founder and CEO of Planet FWD, a San Francisco climate-intelligence software company that helps consumer brands measure and cut the carbon footprint of their products. She is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn (Zume Pizza, valued at $2.25B), a three-time food-industry founder, and the creator of Moonshot Snacks, the climate-friendly cracker brand acquired by Patagonia Provisions in 2023. Planet FWD turns life-cycle assessments and Scope 1/2/3 inventories into decarbonization roadmaps for brands from Cava to Everlane.
Ramsey Masri
Ramsey Masri is the CEO of Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging), an Oakland-based agricultural intelligence platform that has analyzed over 17 billion plant-level measurements across 32 million acres and 40+ crop types worldwide. A UC Berkeley graduate who grew up on a family farm in Peru and spent 20 years as a California grape grower in Napa Valley, Masri bridges the worlds of technology, data analytics, and hands-on farming. Before Ceres, he served as COO at Zendrive and spent his early career at Oracle working under Larry Ellison, Ray Lane, and Tom Siebel. Under his leadership, Ceres rebranded as Ceres AI, raised a $13M Series D round led by Remus Capital in 2024-2025, was named to TIME Magazine's 2024 Top GreenTech Companies list, and made history by appointing the first AI board member in the agriculture industry.