Morning Mingle: Do Clean Labels Matter Today?

On the last Wednesday of most months, Naturally Boulder’s Morning Mingles are THE place to learn about a timely, hot topic.

Do Clean Labels Matter Today?

When: May 27, 2020,  12:15 PM EDT / 11:15 AM CDT/ 10:15 am MDT / 9:15 AM PDT
Where: Zoom Online Conferencing
Register here
Subject Track: Sales, Marketing & Distribution

Given the state of retail today, does a clean label attract customers? Could a clean label actually drive down costs? And how can a brand further – or begin – their clean label journey? Learn directly from experts at Ingredion, a leading global ingredients solutions company, plus Lily’s, a brand that embraces clean labels, and Pilot R&D, which provides culinary and scientific expertise for research and development for restaurants and food companies. Whether you want to reformulate to satisfy consumer demands, increase your margins, or deepen your commitment to health and wellness, a clean label may make all the difference in helping to ensure that your product is chosen over and over again.

Learn from the Experts

Panelists:
Jenn Burns – Relationship Manager, Pilot R&D
Pat O’Brien – Regional Platform Leader, Clean & Simple Ingredients, US/Canada, Ingredion
Cynthia Tice – Founder, Lily’s

Moderator:
Sari Levy  – Market Research Manager, New Hope Network

Meet  the Experts

Jenn Burns
Jenn is the Relationship Manager at Pilot R&D, a food product development and innovation firm that helps food brands formulate and scale new food products for market. Jenn specifically works closely with Pilot’s clients, ingredient suppliers, and co-packers to ensure Pilot is developing innovative products that can be successfully produced at scale. There are a lot of puzzle pieces that need to come together to bring a new food product to market; Jenn’s job is to make sure those puzzle pieces not only fit together, but come together as quickly as possible. From farms to Fortune 100 companies, Jenn has experienced many parts of our food system. She began working on farms to learn where our food comes from. She worked in grocery at Green BEAN Delivery, the largest home grocery delivery service in the Midwest, where she drove B2B business. Jenn built economic incentives and educational tools to enable and encourage client employee behavior change (and lower insurance costs, to boot!). Later, at Google with Bon Appétit, Jenn worked on how small nudges can result in big behavior change, specifically looking at how food can be used to increase employee creativity in the workplace. At Davidson College, Jenn made her own major in Food and Environmental Studies, an economic and political look at the forces that create our food system. She also holds a Masters in Food Culture and Communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy where she studied the critical role food plays in building culture and identity.

Sari Levy
Sari designs and executes custom qualitative and quantitative market research projects as the Market Research Manager at New Hope Network in Boulder. Much of her time is dedicated to predicting the success of early stage food, beverage and supplement concepts. As part of this focus, she manages the NEXT Concept Lab, a dedicated idea-filtering pipeline that includes a prediction market, customized sample and tailored concept formats to rapidly test ideas across multiple product types. She has worked with many of the world’s largest CPG companies on new product development. Her primary interest is in reshaping our food system to be more sustainable. Prior to joining New Hope Network, Sari managed consumer insights research and market intelligence in the healthcare and life sciences sectors, working with pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Sari is a graduate of Trinity University, where she earned a B.A. in English Literature, and the University of Colorado, where she earned an M.B.A. Sari lives in Boulder and Telluride, Colorado.

Pat O’Brien
Pat O’Brien is Ingredion‘s Regional Platform Leader, Clean & Simple Ingredients, U.S./Canada. In his role, Pat is responsible for Ingredion’s Clean & Simple strategy and delivery of annual targets for growth in the U.S. & Canada.  He works closely with a global team focused on Clean & Simple Ingredients to execute business development, marketing and innovation.  Pat joined Ingredion in 2007 and has held roles of increasing responsibility in the areas of marketing and business development. Pat holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration, with a major in food marketing, from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Cynthia Tice
Cynthia is the Founder of Lily’s Sweets, a manufacturer of no sugar chocolate treats. She got her start in the natural foods industry before green juice was cool. She opened a natural foods grocery store, Center Foods, in Philadelphia in 1978, and owned and operated that store for 20 years. As supermarkets realized the staying power of natural and organic foods, Tice began consulting retailers on how to launch or build out their natural and organic offerings. She also began advising brands looking to launch natural and organic products. While working with a client who wanted to launch a natural soda, Tice became aware of the opportunity for naturally sweetened, no added sugar foods. This trend was emerging as a result of growing consumer sentiments to limit sugar, along with all time high levels of distrust of non-nutritive artificial sweeteners. As a long-time user of stevia, when the ingredient was granted GRAS status in 2008, Tice began experimenting with making chocolate with stevia to satisfy her own need for a no added sugar chocolate (her favorite food) that she could eat daily. In 2011, the recipe was perfected using not only stevia, but also the finest Fair Trade, additive-free, and Non-GMO other ingredients in order to benefit both people and planet. By 2012, Lily’s Sweets was on shelves in Whole Foods stores nationwide. Today, Lily’s Sweets remains a leader in the no added sugar movement through continued innovation, and the company’s chocolates and confections can be found in more than 24,000 stores nationwide. Lily’s Sweets has been recognized by Forbes as a “mission-driven company reinventing the packaged food industry.”

HOW DO ONLINE EVENTS WORK?

Participants will be able to see and hear the presenters, but participants’ cameras won’t be on, and their mics will be muted. Participants will be able to interact with each other using the Chat box and type questions to our featured panelists via the Q&A box.

ANY TIPS ABOUT USING ZOOM?

If you have used Zoom previously but not recently, you may want to make sure you’ve downloaded the latest version for optimal results. Click here for specific instructions on how to proceed. While you can access Zoom via your computer’s browser (Chrome is preferred) without creating an account, you may have a better experience if you download the Zoom interface to your computer and log into your free account. The Zoom app is also available for your smartphone. Note that the quality of the Webinar will fluctuate both based on your internet connection and that of the presenters.