000
Days :00
Hrs :00
Mins :00
Secs
Founder & Managing Director of Icos Capital, Netherlands
Nityen Lal is the founder and Managing Director of Icos Capital, an Amsterdam-based collaborative venture capital firm investing in sustainable food systems, chemicals & materials, and decarbonization. A venture capitalist for more than two decades, he has led and internationally syndicated deals, trade sales, and IPOs alongside top-tier funds, with earlier roles at AlpInvest Partners and Deloitte Consulting. He serves on the boards of portfolio companies including Squirro and eAgronom and is a member of Invest Europe's VC Council. Nityen is a graduate of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.
Founder and CEO of Food Supply Chain Labs, Netherlands
Wilbert Hilkens is Founder and CEO of Food Supply Chain Labs. His career spans 10 years in trade, 12 years in banking and 10 years as an entrepreneur. He now helps major food companies across North-West Europe turn supply chain data into collateral insights, CO2 insights and quality insights that unlock financing and drive excellence. His expertise lies in connecting financing with supply chain performance, using AI to turn operational data into bankable intelligence. This blend of financial and operational excellence gives food companies a new lever for growth and resilience. He speaks internationally on financing and supply chain excellence.
R&D- QA Director of Prinsen Berning, Netherlands
Petra den Dikken is Director of R&D, Quality, and Sustainability at Prinsen Berning, where she leads international teams developing high protein bars and powders for major private label brands. With over 25 years of experience at companies including Unilever, FrieslandCampina, and Danone, she brings deep expertise in food technology, product development, and quality assurance. Her work focuses on improving taste, texture, and nutritional performance while advancing sustainable ingredient innovation. Petra plays a key role in industry collaborations such as Redesign Food for Value, driving science based, consumer focused solutions in the rapidly evolving Active Nutrition sector.
Vice President at Nestlé Europe, Switzerland
Senior Innovation, PMO and Transformation leader with 25+ years experience driving growth through new business models, demand-led innovation, and route-to-market transformation, I am typically brought into complex environments to convert consumer insight into innovation systems and disrupt with new business models to ignite business growth. 46 Most recently, I served as Vice President at Nestlé Europe, leading the Innovation Portfolio and Project Management Office for the Food division. Prior to this, I held Managing Director roles with P&L responsibility across Africa, Asia, and Europe, 38 Since May 2026, a Senior Advisor with Alixio, I support business development in Interim Management.
CEO of Innoget, Spain
Innovation leader with 20+ years of experience transforming corporate priorities into scalable growth through Corporate Venturing, Open Innovation, and FoodTech ecosystems. As Co-founder and CEO of Innoget, I bridge the gap between enterprise challenges and high-impact startups, research, and international ventures. Core Expertise Corporate Venturing & Strategy: End-to-end management across the Build–Partner–Invest lifecycle, aligning CVC, Venture Building, and selective M&A with measurable business outcomes. Venture Clienting & Open Innovation: Expert in startup scouting, pilot validation, and integrating FoodTech and emerging tech solutions directly into enterprise operations. AI-Driven Innovation: Combining AI-enhanced intelligence with human judgment to accelerate technology transfer, streamline experimentation, and de-risk strategic investments.
Founding Partner at SPECTRUM Scaling, The Netherlands
Ferry Kamp is an international food and FMCG executive, venture builder and board director with 25+ years of leadership experience across global multinationals, founder-led startups and investor-backed scale-ups. A former member of UNILEVER’s Food Leadership Teams in Europe and Asia-Pacific, he combines corporate operating discipline with hands-on experience scaling fast-paced foodtech ventures, such as V2Food, GREENFORCE, INSEACT and TurtleTree. Today, Ferry is Advisor at EIT Food, Executive Chair at Cultivated Food Labs and Founding Partner at SPECTRUM Scaling, helping founders, boards and investors turn food innovation into scalable commercial growth.
CEO and Co-Founder of FoodWeb AI, Spain
I am Yago Ferretti, a professional chef turned founder, CEO and co-founder of FoodWeb AI, based at the Lanzadera accelerator in Valencia, Spain. I trained and worked in some of the world's leading kitchens, including DiverXO, Osteria Francescana and StreetXO, and studied at the Basque Culinary Centre. Working inside professional kitchens, I saw how poorly sustainability was understood in the food industry. That pushed me to understand what truly drives the unsustainability of our food systems, from invisible waste to broken operations.
Founder at Favamole
Andres Jara is a chef, farmer and founder of Favamole®, connecting regenerative agriculture with food innovation. His experience spans professional kitchens, farming in the Netherlands and building a food brand around fava beans. He brings a practical understanding of how ingredients move from soil to plate—and what it takes to turn an agricultural opportunity into a product people want to eat. At Food Week, Andres shares a founder’s perspective on making legumes desirable, developing commercial partnerships and growing a business that connects flavour, farmer livelihoods and the regeneration of agricultural land.
Avanzo, Italy
Micol Rossetti is a food-tech professional with a background in Political Science and International Relations (University of Pavia) and a Master's in Food Technologies (University of Padova, including an exchange at the University of Sydney). She currently works as Marketing Associate & Project Manager at Eatable Adventures, supporting agrifood startup scouting and acceleration, and she is the founder of Avanzo, an anti-food-waste platform using computer-vision and OCR product recognition with expiry-date tracking. Her background spans food policy analysis, sustainability communication and go-to-market strategy for early-stage foodtech ventures.
Founder of JLP GLOBAL, Spain
Juan Luis Vera is a foodtech entrepreneur, consultant and international speaker based in Madrid, Spain. With more than 20 years of experience in startups and technology, and over 13 years in restaurants, QSR and franchising, he has supported more than 100 food-service brands across Europe, Latin America and the United States. He is founder of JLP GLOBAL, an international ecosystem for food-service businesses, and co-founder and Commercial Director of JLP TECH, a European startup developing AI-powered automation and gastro-robotics solutions for the HORECA sector in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Lecturer Food Science at Teesside University, United Kingdom
Anne is a food scientist who moved to the UK bakery industry following a PhD in Analytical Chemistry at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. At Campden BRI, Anne focussed on structure formation, sugar reduction and use of alternative grains in bakery goods. Being part of the technical team at a major UK flour mill gave a solid grounding in quality control and HACCP. After, she joined a start-up business as a research scientist to develop products containing upcycled ingredients. After industry, she returned to academia, sharing her industrial experience with the new generation of Food Scientists as lecturer at Teesside University