Siwen Pan
Momo Wu
Shannon Theobald
Shannon helps foodtech founders launch and scale *without* working 15+ hour days, so they can get back what they do best - making world-changing products.
Her background is in corporate strategy and merchandising at fortune 50 retailers such as Walmart and Kroger, where she partnered with top CPGs like Tyson, Mondelez, Nestle, Danone, PepsiCo, JBS, Kellogg, Hormel, and more. She has also worked on projects for Bain, BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, and EY.
Shannon is an alternative protein author (Printing Your Dinner), Podcast Host (Big Food Big Future), speaker, and strategist. She stopped eating meat at the age of 3 when her mother jokingly told her pepperoni was made out of butterfly wings.
Ricarda Dewes
Amy Chen
Amy Chen is the Chief Operating Officer of UPSIDE Foods, the world’s leading cultivated meat company, which is focused on growing delicious meat directly from animal cells. As COO, Amy leads the brand's global strategy and commercial functions, including sales and marketing, finance and operations, product development, food safety and public policy. She's also helping scale the company's culture as it enters this next phase, following the US FDA green light for UPSIDE Foods' cultivated chicken. Prior to joining UPSIDE Foods, Amy was Senior Vice President for PepsiCo Beverages North America. She previously served as the Chief Marketing Officer for PepsiCo Snacks in the Greater China Region, in addition to other sales, operations, strategy and innovation roles. She has an M.B.A. and a J.D. from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Harvard.
Bryan Ulmer
Bryan grew up farming small grains in western Canada before completing a Ph.D. at the University of Saskatchewan on plant-based resistance to insect pests. He then went on to a post-doc at the University of Alberta working on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and followed that with a post-doc at the University of Florida researching biological controls of introduced crop pests. For the last 17 years Bryan has been working as a scientist for Syngenta, first in the US focused primarily on crop protection in broad acre crops then in Switzerland as a global technical manager before returning to Canada with the cereals breeding program. In his current role as the global technical lead for the value chain Bryan is collaborating with food companies and the industry to support quality and production gains while delivering on sustainability targets.
Kayalin Akens-Irby
Kayalin Akens-Irby is an impact-oriented strategist who has spent her career working across tech, investment, and policy to reshape the way we do business to build a sustainable future together. Kayalin is Head of Growth at Planet FWD, the leading climate management platform for consumer companies to tackle climate change. Previously, Kayalin was Head of VC and Growth equity at Malk Partners where she helped build the firm into the leading environmental, social, governance (ESG) investment advisory for private markets, advising on over $500B in AUM.
