James’ experience of the grocery industry is matched by very few in the industry. He served at various times as CEO of Tesco, Carrefour, and Ahold USA, and is now Chairman/CEO of food tech investor Food Retail Ventures, a senior advisor at McKinsey, non-executive Chairman of Green Rabbit grocery delivery service and Grillo’s Pickles, and an investor/advisor/board member for a number of AI food startups. James supports Halla with market strategy, industry intelligence and business connections.

Toby has over 20 years of experience managing companies in the fields of technology, marketing, and entertainment. He co-founded Petrol Advertising in 2003 and led its growth to over 100 employees. Toby then became pop group Black-eyed Peas artist will.i.am’s COO, striking partnerships with Adidas, Coca-Cola, Levis, Apple and Intel, and launching the tech startup i.am+, where he helped raise millions in capital and was chiefly responsible for its most popular product— Buttons earphones. Toby advises Halla on branding & strategy. Outside of Halla, you can find Toby sneaking into his teenage daughters’ Tik Tok videos.

Rick “Wedge” Wedgeworth is a computational scientist, cloud architect, data scientist, systems designer, foodie and amateur cicerone. He honed his skills across the biotech, health informatics, and e-commerce industries working in senior technology roles for the Harvard Medical School, EBay, and Wells Fargo Bank, amongst others. Wedge advises Halla’s tech team on vision, data architecture, and building for enterprise scale. Wedge also mentors and advises several startups and is an adjunct technology professor. Wedge doesn’t just wear many hats, he collects them as he travels with his family, enjoying culture, history, art, wildlife and—of course, food.

Alexander is a leading expert in personalization, recommender systems, data mining, and CRM and an NYU Stern School of Business professor of information systems. He serves on the boards of the ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, the INFORMS Journal on Computing and the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal. Dr. Tuzhilin’s patents and expertise have been utilized by Facebook, Google, and other notable technology leaders. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and the Financial Times. Dr. Tuzhilin helps ensure that Halla’s recommendation and personalization science is the best in the industry.

Mark has 35 years of experience building and operationalizing enterprise IT infrastructure, including 15 years helping organizations adopt Cloud, Data Center, Edge Computing, and Cloud Native Design. He founded Data Center Pulse, was a member of the board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is chair of the IDC-A.org technical committee, and is an active speaker at leading industry events. Mark was CIO/CSO of Apcera until their acquisition by Ericsson where he was responsible for Edge strategy. He is now Founder and CEO of Edgevana. Mark advises Halla in the domains of leadership, corporate strategy, enterprise tech sales, and tech scalability.

Eugenio Perrier has 25+ years of experience growing brands internationally. He is a consultant for large and mid-size corporations, a mentor at Food-X innovation accelerator, and an advisor to multiple F&B startups. Eugenio is currently a Partner at Sevendots global CPG marketing consultancy and the Marketing Advisor to Consorzio del Parmigiano Reggiano in his native Italy. Previously, he held multiple senior food marketing roles, including Global CMO of Sabra Dipping Co. Eugenio advises Halla on working CPG brands and helps create new business opportunities. He loves running and cycling, in order to manage the extra calories that come with a passion for food.

Steve is an investor, board member, and advisor for startups, public, and non-profit companies. He is a visionary inventor with a global patent portfolio of over 100 innovations in the consumer, mobile and enterprise sectors. From 2009 to 2015, Steve built the global mobile business for the eBay family (eBay, PayPal, StubHub), established eBay inc. as the world’s largest mobile e-comm player, with $15B in sales volume, and was named a top 10 m-commerce chief by Internet Retailer. His practical experience at the cutting edge of innovation includes image recognition, code scanning, augmented reality, 3D printing, mobile positioning, personalization, companion shopping, and predictive analytics.

Jordan brings to Halla thirty years of strategic leadership as an entrepreneur and leading marketing and media agency executive. He has developed, negotiated and implemented billions in cross-platform media and promotional strategies to fuel blockbuster motion picture openings, chart-topping retail and brand promotions, holiday-winning toy and game campaigns, highly-profitable and optimized lead-generation models, and disease-fighting cause marketing campaigns. At Halla Jordan is helping develop our shopper marketing strategy as well as our strategic data partnerships.

Dan was of the first five hires at Deliveroo, the largest food delivery service in the UK. He wrote the startup’s expansion playbook, helping it achieve “unicorn” status in just three years. Dan ran an eight-figure P&L and was responsible for scaling Deliveroo to hundreds of staff. After departing, he co-founded a B2B neobank focused on the crypto and blockchain space which did $1.5B in GMV in its first year. Dan has a Philosophy Degree from the University of Cambridge. His role at Halla is to make sure the company has the tools and fundamentals in place to raise capital and scale quickly and efficiently.

Luke manages the ZX Ventures (AB InBev) technology investment fund. He helps Halla strategize on business development, fundraising, and interfacing with large corporations. He is also a master networker, helping Halla connect with partners on both the sales and fundraising realms.

Helping build four startups from the ground up ingrained Olivia with deep expertise in project and change management, business operations, and scaling technology companies, all of which she advises the Halla executive team on. She ran a CPG supply chain operation from farm to production and scaled company operations through 5 years of rapid growth and $200M in funding at enterprise cloud infrastructure firm Apcera. A natural-born foodie, Olivia grew up in a family restaurant, is trained in French pastry, and continues to manage a small farm in the PNW with its own online store.