Grant has 15 years of experience developing new innovations in low- and middle-income countries. He was most recently the Senior Director for Innovation at the International Rescue Committee, where he helped build a 50+ R&D team and supported portfolios in malnutrition and maternal and neonatal health. Grant has worked in leadership positions in development sector and has extensive experience building high-performing teams across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Fre has worked in fermentation technology for 18 years. Most recently, she was the Director of Fermentation at Culture Biosciences, a series C startup valued at $500M, where she led large scale bioreactor builds and established and oversaw a team of engineers to accelerate bioprocessing using high-throughput bioreactors. She has managed more than 50 company’s fermentation processes and developed large bio-process engineering teams.
Taylor is a social entrepreneur dedicated to designing and implementing nutritious low-cost food systems. He has built a number of nutritious low-cost food products and companies in 10 countries, ranging from Liberia to Brazil. Taylor also led venture-backed Eat JUST’s Emerging Markets expansion and built a new unit dedicated to nutritious low-cost food system development for the UN World Food Programme.
Building a best-in-class, mission-driven organization poised to create breakthrough innovations requires focus, commitment, and joy. We are laser-focused with our time, energy and resources. We are committed to the problem rather than any specific solution, and we are obsessed with designing solutions that our customers love. We are motivated by the urgency of the problem, and we bring a good dose of joy to our work.
We believe that creating locally-grounded breakthrough innovations is key to solving the most important problems of our time. Transforming food systems and tackling malnutrition requires new thinking, new capabilities, and new models. We’re courageous and willing to take the leap to create new solutions, and always ground our audacity and interrogate our assumptions with a deep-seated humility.
Delivering high-impact, cost-effective innovations at scale is core to our DNA. We are committed to creating innovations that outperform current practices on impact and cost-effectiveness and scale to meet the actual size of the problem. We not only assess our innovations across these metrics, but we design our innovations for them. These translate into our daily work too: we are a data-driven, results-oriented team. We work effectively, efficiently and care about how well we do the work.
We know our work is hard and that no single individual or organization can solve this problem alone. We work with a broad set of partners and cultivate strong relationships with those partners to amplify our impact and each other’s impact.
We build - and just like being a part of - diverse teams with different life experiences that see the world in different ways. These different experiences ground our work, spark creativity, and make us a stronger organization. We create the conditions necessary for everyone in our organization to feel safe and excel.
We know the best work is grounded in empathy and curiosity. We are generous in our interpretation of each other. We focus on asking questions and listening. We interrogate assumptions. We are genuinely interested in learning. We not only think this is the best way to enjoy the work we do, but to do good work.