The merger built a pantry few rivals can match. A decade later, Kraft Heinz is spending more, reorganizing faster and asking whether famous brands can become growth brands again.
Matias Muchnick is the Chilean co-founder and CEO of NotCo, a food-tech company that uses a proprietary AI system called Giuseppe to design plant-based versions of dairy and meat products. Founded in 2015, NotCo became Chile's first unicorn in 2021, formed a joint venture with Kraft Heinz, and counts Bezos Expeditions among its investors.
Nicole Pekerman is a brand marketer turned founder who spent 17+ years steering billion-dollar names like Tim Hortons, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Wonder Bread before launching Paid Workout, a fitness-motivation app that pays people to move. Today she runs Health Collective LLC as CEO and Chief Wellness Officer, hosts The Healthy Pod, and builds wellness products aimed squarely at women. Her work fuses big-brand marketing instincts with a community-first take on motivation and gamified habit-building.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.