10: Bolthouse Farms’ Jeff Dunn Discusses Empathetic Leadership and Plant-Based Foods
Jeff Dunn cut his teeth at Coca Cola and gained even more experience in the food industry with the Campbell Soup Company. But where he found his passion was becoming CEO of Bolthouse Farms, a packaged foods company that grew out of a small Michigan farm in 1915. In fact, that passion led him to buy the company back from Campbell’s after selling it to them in 2012. In this episode of Lead With We, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff about how differences in company culture led to the buy-back and taking an agile approach to consumer packaged goods. Plus, we discuss how the enormous demand for plant-based foods is reshaping our food system and how COVID opened up a conversation between Jeff and his leadership team about empathy.
6: How Thistle’s Ashwin Cheriyan Motivates People To Make Better Choices For Themselves and the Planet
Ashwin Cheriyan took the leap into entrepreneurship with his wife, Shiri Avnery, when he started the plant-based meal delivery service, Thistle, in 2013. He was a former corporate lawyer, and she was a climate-scientist frustrated by how little people were talking about the environmental impact of reducing demand for animal products, let alone the impact on human health. They knew that getting people to shift their eating habits meant making plant-based meals more delicious and convenient. In this episode of Lead With We, Ashwin and I talk about how his personal connection to healthy food has sustained him through the inevitable ups and downs of entrepreneurship, motivating consumers to make better choices, and so much more.
2: Futurist Sally Uren: How Volatility Unlocks Positive Change
Thanks for joining us for another season of Lead With We. I couldn’t think of a better guest to kick things off than my dear friend, futurist Sally Uren. Sally runs a leading sustainability non-profit called Forum For The Future that works directly with big brands and business leaders to create global change. Together we discuss the future of humanity (literally), and how we’re seeing very different trajectories play out simultaneously in real-time. And what I particularly love about this conversation is that Sally points to growing movements, such as regenerative agriculture and impact investing, as proof that we can build a positive future through our actions.