Innovation in the Baking: Revitalizing Rudi's Organic Bakery!

SPEAKERS
Jane Miller, CEO, Rudi's Organic Bakery
Justin Gold, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, Rudi's Organic Bakery

The founder of Justin's and the former CEO of Rudi's and Lily's joined forces last year to reinvent Rudi's Organic Bakery—and give this nearly 50-year-old company the mentality of a start-up! Jane Miller was CEO at Rudi’s from 2008 to 2014. In fall 2022, she returned as CEO and has since formed a five-member “Innovation and Impact” board, which includes Rudi’s Co-Founder Sheldon Romer and Justin Gold, founder of Justin’s nut butters (sold to Hormel in 2016). Today, Gold also serves as Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. Listen in as Miller and Gold discuss breakthrough innovation, how to quickly get products to market and develop a new creative culture at Rudi’s.

Jane Miller is a 40-year veteran of the food industry with experience at both Fortune 100 companies (including PepsiCo and Heinz) and various start-ups. She was previously the CEO of Rudi's Bakery from 2008-2014 with an exit to Hain-Celestial. Before returning to Rudi's in 2022 as CEO, she was the CEO of Lily's Sweets which exited to Hershey's in 2021. Her passion is mentoring the next generation of leaders and has a career advice website: janeknows.com.

Justin Gold is the founder of Justin’s, a Boulder-based company that makes high-quality nut butter, organic nut butter cups, and plant-based snacks. Justin is currently leading new product development and strategy for Rudi’s Organic Bakery, the nations first national organic bakery.

How to Improve Your Innovation’s Chance of Success: Four Mistakes to Avoid and Seven Ways Forward

SPEAKERS
Carolina Sasson, Chief Operating Officer, Mission Field
Jonathan Tofel, Founder & CEO, Mission Fields

With over a decade of experience working with Fortune 500 CPG Companies, Mission Field’s Founder/CEO Jonathan Tofel and Chief Operating Officer Carolina Sasson have received dozens of RFP’s with strikingly similar issues identified as root causes for the challenges of creating disruptive innovation within big CPG. In this keynote, Tofel and Sasson begin with the premise that big CPG has the right to lead on innovations of all types. Actually, big CPG needs to lead on innovation, or else! Tofel and Sasson cover four mistakes to avoid and end with seven ways forward to activate disruptive innovation development within an organization.

Jonathan Tofel and Carolina Sasson are the authors of the new book Fire in The Machine: Driving Entrepreneurial Innovation In Large CPG Organizations. Tofel is the Founder and CEO, and Sasson is the Chief Operating Officer of Mission Field, a global innovation, strategy & insights consultancy. Mission Field has twice made the Financial Times America's Fastest-Growing Companies and INC 5000 lists.

As COO, Ms. Sasson helps Fortune 500 CPG clients kickstart their internal innovation processes from ideation and strategy design to prototype development and real-life battle testing. All with the entrepreneurial speed that often alludes large corporations. She has worked with some of the leading CPG companies in the world, including, Clorox, Kraft-Heinz, Keurig Dr. Pepper, Danone, and Ocean Spray.

For more than two decades, Jonathan, CEO of Mission Field, has been a consumer goods package entrepreneur at the forefront of Innovation in Fortune 500 CPG companies. He has worked with clients in the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia to develop 1000s of unique product ideas. His clients have included a who's who of CPGs, including PepsiCo Inc. (Frito-Lay, Quaker), Heineken, General Mills, Tropicana Brands Group, and Kellogg's.

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