Wednesday, 18 May, 2022
Members Day 1

Thursday, 19 May, 2022
Public Session & Members Day 2

Speakers
Public Session

Dr. Eduardo Arellano, is Associate professor at the College of Agriculture and Forest Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC) and Principal Investigator of CAPES (Center of applied Ecology and Sustainability, Santiago, Chile). His areas of interest are restoration ecology of degraded land and ecological intensification in agriculture systems (soil carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, water retention). He is currently working on the co-design of sustainable indicators for global food markets for fruit farms and vineyards in central Chile and in the Caatinga Region in Brazil.

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Geraldine has been working for HEINEKEN for 8 years.  She joined the Dutch brewer in its French subsidiary as Procurement manager & Sustainability lead.  In 2018, Geraldine has evolved towards the Global HEINEKEN Agriculture sustainability lead role, with a key challenge to develop 2040 Agriculture & Processing net zero strategies. Since 2020, she started implementing few hundreds low carbon farming pilot projects in 15 sourcing countries, together with HEINEKEN main suppliers. The Raw materials sustainability agenda also covers Sustainable & Regenerative agriculture, Land Use Change and Water agendas.

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Franco joined Control Union (UK) as Managing Director in 2016. He has worked for about 15 years in the Testing, Inspections and Certifications sector across a range of industries including agri-food, consumer products, industrial. Before that, he carried out research work in Aeronautics and Aerospace. Franco holds a Master of Business Administration MBA, a post-grad Research Master (M.Res) in Fluid Dynamics  and a Master of Engineering (M.Eng) in Mechanical Engineering. He likes travelling and wines.

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James joined Cargill in 2018. In his current role he is responsible for setting and managing the delivery of the Cargill Starches, Sweeteners and Texturizers global sustainability goals. In addition, he is leading several regenerative agriculture projects globally. He studied across the UK, in the areas of sustainability and agriculture. His career has principally focused on embedding sustainability within agri food systems and brands, through advising farmers, creating value with customers, shaping public policies and building brand sustainability reputation. He has held a number of diverse roles a cross the supply chain before joining Cargill, in the private and public sectors and trade associations. Prior to Cargill he was at Kellogg Company in Public Affairs Sustainability. Roles before that included a National Park Ranger on Hadrian’s Wall, a farm environmental adviser for the UK government and Assistant Director in the UK National Farmers’ Union office in Brussels, Belgium.

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André Eitner’s career in sustainable agriculture started 10 years ago at Fairtrade Intl. where he played a leading role in developing the organization’s mechanism to support smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. His focus during that time was on East Africa where he spent around 6 months every year working in the field with farmers. Andre joined PepsiCo 3 years ago as an Agro Sustainability Manager and leads – among others – PepsiCo’s global demonstration farms program. Andre holds an MST in Sustainability Leadership from the University of Cambridge and lives in the UK with his wife and daughter.

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Khaoula Essoussi is an Agri-food engineer and has been working with Danone for the last eight years. She started her career at global sustainability performance and coordinated the environmental management system for 200 factories. In 2020 she started a new role as Global Dairy Sustainability Manager to support Danone’s 2050 Climate net-zero strategic roadmap. Since 2020, Khaoula is leading the definition of decarbonisation roadmaps aligned with SBTi 1.5 and agriculture sector (FLAG) pathways for the dairy supply chain over more than 20 countries, combining direct and indirect sourcing models. Within this role she has strong focus on monitoring and reducing the milk CO2 footprint, directly linked with combined livestock and crops production systems. She also takes part in different methods groups e.g. of the Cool Farm Alliance, the Carbon sequestration initiative (C sequ) co-lead with another 5 major dairy companies, and the dairy group of SAI Platform.

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Marianne Landzettel is an ag journalist writing and blogging about food, farming and agricultural policies in the UK, continental Europe and the US. She is the author of “Regenerative Agriculture: Farming with Benefits. Profitable Farms. Healthy Food. Greener Planet” and co-author of several other books published in German. She was UK and Ireland correspondent for German Public Radio where she started her career as a reporter for the farming program. From 2003 until 2013 she worked for the BBC World Service. Since then she is writing and blogging for farming publications and other media outlets in the UK, the US and in Germany. She lives in London. Twitter: @M_Landzettel. Internet: LondonCowGirl.com.

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Dr. Jan Peter Lesschen has over 10 year experience on greenhouse gas emissions, soil science, land use, agriculture and regional scale modelling. He is working at Wageningen Environmental Research since 2008 as researcher and project leader. A key characteristic of his work is integrating knowledge and data from different expertise, e.g. land use, environment and agriculture. He is responsible for the development and application of the MITERRA model. He is member of the LULUCF working group that is responsible for the emission inventory of the LULUCF sector for the Netherlands. He is involved in several EU funded projects and service contracts for DG Environment, DG CLIMA and DG Energy. Jan Peter has published more than 35 papers in international scientific journals with peer review and several book chapters and scientific reports.

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Alberto has been working for Heineken for 17 years. He started in 2005 working for Heineken Mexico and since then has had different roles within the Procurement team focussing on Direct Materials (Raw and Pack). In 2015, Alberto built the first Agriculture Structure in Heineken Mexico, to develop direct relationship with barley farmers and to create the Sustainability strategy for the future. In 2018, he became the Procurement Director for HMex and developed sustainability roadmaps for all main spending categories with the goal to guarantee a sustainable future. In 2022, Alberto moved to the Netherlands to become the Strategic Sourcing Director for Raw Materials, where he continues pushing the sustainability agenda in the agriculture sector, while managing inflation & innovation and securing supply.

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Caitlin is an experienced researcher and analyst in sustainable food and farming and biodiversity conservation. At 3Keel, Caitlin works across the Resilient Agriculture and Sustainable Commodities work areas, focusing on projects related to sustainable agriculture and landscape management and environmental and social impacts of agri-commodity sourcing. Her previous experience includes working as a Policy Analyst at the Institute of European Environmental Policy, as a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and as an independent consultant for the Cool Farm Alliance, developing the original biodiversity module for the Cool Farm Tool.

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David McMahon joined the Cool Farm Alliance as Product Manager in January 2021. A graduate of Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence (1990, Sussex), David’s first career was seven years in fair trade where he worked on the CafeDirect project, the first fair trade product into British supermarkets, and spent two years on the ground in Ghana helping to establish the farmer owned cocoa startup Kuapa Kokoo. David changed career into finance IT and in the following twenty years played a key role in many data management projects enhancing capability through reference data, business intelligence, straight through processing, data migration and more. David holds his MSc in Global Climate and Energy Policy (2018, SOAS).

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Loekie is a PhD-candidate at the Wageningen University and Research, at the Farming Systems Ecology group (FSE) and Animal Production Systems group (APS). His research focusses on the transition towards regenerative agriculture. Loekie holds a BSc-degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences, and a MSc-degree in Biosystems Engineering from the Wageningen University and Research. His first thesis focused on the assessment of the thermal environment of mealworm kept in a large-scale production system. A second thesis focused on greenhouse gas emissions produced by growing mealworms assessed by flow-through respirometry. Since 2018 Loekie is working on his PhD within TiFN’s (Top institute for Food and Nutrition) Regenerative Farming project. This project aims to bring scientists, sector organisations farmers and food chain companies together to identify the characteristics of regenerative agriculture and work towards its implementation by 2050.

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