More about the Panelists

Planted, Switzerland

Christoph Jenny is one of four founders of Planted and a member of the Executive Board. Driven by the desire to create better meat than animals. Christoph has a masters degree in Finance and started his career at Credit Suisse’s Asset Management team. Before founding Planted, Christoph  worked at Jacobs Holding as well as Consumer Investment Partners. Planted, with its pioneering biostructuring approach of combining protein structuring and biotech, is currently the fastest growing start-up in the alternative protein space in Europe.  Chris leads the circles for Finance, HR, Brand & Marketing as well as Corporate Communications at Planted.  

MOA Foodtech, Spain

Bosco Emparanza García, is the CEO and Founder of MOA FoodTech, a B2B animal free ingredient platform. Bosco is a Biochemist from the University of Navarra with an MBA in biotechnology companies, CESIF. He has 5 years of commercial and business development experience in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and food industry. Since 2018 he’s part of the commercial area of AINIA Centro Tecnológico. His previous start-up, Biotech Service, was a marketplace for biotech services. 

Big Idea Ventures

Andrew Ive is the Founder and Managing General Partner at Big Idea Ventures. He founded Big Idea Ventures to help solve the world's biggest challenges by supporting the world's best entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers. Andrew is responsible for investing and building companies across alternative protein, foodtech and the agtech sectors. Andrew works with investors, corporations and governments to invest and build the most transformative companies and ecosystems around the world. Serving on the Tufts Nutrition Council advisory board, and a Friedman School Entrepreneurship Advisor, Andrew is a Harvard Business School graduate and Procter & Gamble brand management trained. Andrew has invested in more early stage / pre-seed food companies than most other investors worldwide. Big Idea Ventures has teams and offices in New York, Singapore and Paris.

The Cultured Hub, Bühler Group, Switzerland

Yannick Gächter is Managing Director of The Cultured Hub. The Cultured Hub is focused on helping fermentation and cultured food startups accelerate to market with a dedicated scaleup facility and team here in Switzerland. Before joining The Cultured Hub, Yannick was leading the Food Application Center in Minneapolis for Bühler Group, focused on innovation in sustainable plant-based proteins and led the first Scale It Up competition in North America. Yannick has a background in IT with master’s in business administration.

 MassChallenge Switzerland

Nicolas Meneses is Sustainable Food Systems Manager. With a Ph.D. in Food Technology and Processing, Nicolas worked for over 8 at Bühler Group as R&D Team Leader, Food Safety Expert, and Head of Technology. He’s also a business developer in the alternative proteins’ field and the Advisory Board Member of the startup Fotortec. In 2021, he became part of the MassChallenge Team as the Vertical Lead in Sustainable Food Systems, leading both Sustainable Food Challenge and Accelerator’s Food Track.

Future Events

MassChallenge is the global network for innovators. Headquartered in the United States with eight locations worldwide, it is the non-profit's mission to help bold entrepreneurs disrupt the status quo and create sustainable change. Since launching in 2009, MassChallenge has run programs in 18 countries, supported more than 3,000 startups from around the world, and awarded over $17M in equity-free cash and prizes. Learn more about MassChallenge at masschallenge.org.