WE’RE YFOOD

THE HOUSE OF FOOD TECH

WHO WE ARE

We’re the largest curated global community of companies, trends, technologies, innovations and people looking to shape the future of food. We’re lucky enough to host the most influential, disruptive, technical and innovative companies, people and investors across the food value chain.

We believe that by leveraging the power and expertise in our community, we can help develop impactful solutions to solve global food issues in a commercial, replicable and scalable manner.

OUR MISSION

We’re on a mission to create a new food ecosystem; one that is healthier, transparent, accessible, more efficient, regenerative and sustainable, as well as, commercially viable, exciting, fun and able to meet our evolving needs - we’d love you to join us!

HOW WE WORK

Attend events, learn, discover, and connect through the YFood Hub.
Accelerate and build impactful ventures with the YFood team, our experts and the community via the YFood Venture Studio.

MEET THE TEAM

Nadia El Hadery

Founder & CEO

Lover of all things tea, Nadia has been taking the Food Tech world by storm since 2013, when she set about creating London’s first and very powerful community around Food Tech. Since then she has grown it into the global community that YFood is today! Nadia is one of the world’s leading Food Tech experts providing insight, knowledge and expertise to anyone from BBC News to the One Show, as well as the world’s leading food brands, investors, government agencies – you may have spotted her in the media or on stage delivering one of her famous trends talks across the globe. Nadia believes that through education, collaboration and innovation – and the integration of technology – we can transform the food industry for the better.

Sami El Hadery

Chief Innovation Officer

A serial entrepreneur, who setup his first business at the age of 18. Founded Rokki, an in-flight entertainment, shopping and Wi-Fi platform that secured a USD50M contract with AirAsia and exited the business in 2016 to AirAsia. The system saved the airlines millions and won best in class.

2016, Sami then spearheaded a joint venture with AirAsia and formed the ticketing platform, AirAsiaRedTix that sold over RM100M tickets.

Sami also setup Bakehouse, a microservice SAAS platform that expedites the launch of its own & 3rd party startups with its technology arm based in Indonesia.

LISA TOOKEY

Advisor

Former Chief Commercial Officer to the Jamie Oliver Group, with more than 20 years experience in commercial and operational excellence, working with multinational media owners, SME’s and startups. Lisa has a deep commercial acumen driving rapid growth and transforming profitability for the businesses she works with. An industry thought leader and a regular speaker at industry events, Lisa is also an advisor to a number of businesses in the food tech landscape.

“During her eight years with us, Lisa made a significant contribution to the growth and commercial success of the business and was a valued member of the senior management team. Lisa is a total joy to work with and would be an asset to any business lucky enough to have her.” Jamie Oliver

WHAT FOOD TECH MEANS TO US

Food Tech is technological innovation across the whole food value chain, from farm to plate to bin and everything else in between - production, transportation and storage, processing, marketing, distribution, consumption and ultimately disposal.

Food Tech has the potential to change the value chain by improving or replacing existing technology solutions. It can also create entirely new links in the value chain and open up new markets; or it could eliminate weak links that have long been causing inefficiencies in the industry and ecosystem.

At YFood, we look at technological innovation with a wide lense and include everything from the application of new or changed software, hardware, science, ingredients through to disruptive business models.

OUR STORY

We’re born from the ground up, which means we have well established, authentic and deep rooted relationships in the ecosystem. We’ve fundamentally changed the stories for so many of the startups in our community – securing them their first pilot, first client, series of clients, investment rounds and more. However, this is about our story, the story of how we accidentally became the pioneers of the power of a community and the application of technology to change the global food ecosystem.

In London in 2013, a group of Food Tech founders, including our very own YFood founder, were struggling to find support and solutions for the challenges they faced within their own Food Tech startups. They decided to build their own meetup for Food Tech founders, anticipating a maximum of 6 people to turn up to a pub on a Wednesday night, they were needless to say surprised when 30+ turned up; some of which are now consider the leading global Food Tech founders, some of which came with an idea and have now IPO’d. And that’s how the very first version of Food Tech Wednesdays was born!

We’ve now been running Food Tech Wednesdays on a monthly basis since 2013, London Food Tech Week since 2015 and formalised YFood in 2016. So as you can imagine we’ve met countless founders, we’ve been part of incredible success stories and have also witnessed a large number of failures. We’ve worked with large organisations to understand and solve the challenges they face, created deal flow for investors, nurtured and championed Food Tech founders, become experts in forecasting future trends and visionaries in landscaping the future of food. However, what we’re most proud of is the value we’ve added to the community, the Food Tech success stories we’ve created and how we’ve ernt their trust.

We’ve now grown the community to 24,000+, made up of founders, startups, future-preneurs, larger food and drink industry players, industry SMEs and investors, across 35+ countries and host some of the most influential people and organisations in the world.

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