“Few industries fascinate me like food and beverage. It takes food from the farm to our plates, and it is far more complex and innovative than consumers ever see. Ingredients are where it gets most exciting: tastes keep shifting while regulation keeps getting harder to navigate.”
Jérôme van Innis
About Jérôme
Jérôme van Innis is a CEO-in-Residence at WAD Capital focused on speciality food ingredients, with 18 years across food, consumer goods and agriculture. He started in procurement and commercial operations at Procter & Gamble, then redesigned operating models and supply chains for food and beverage manufacturers at Booz & Co. He went on to advise ministers on agricultural policy at Ethiopia's Agricultural Transformation Agency, where he led the hiring that grew the analytics team to 60 people, and co-founded Pumpkn, a digital lender to agri and food SMEs in South Africa.
Vision
Jérôme sees the speciality food ingredients market being reshaped by regulation and consumer demand, as food manufacturers reformulate toward cleaner labels and ingredient majors increasingly hand smaller accounts to local partners. Those smaller manufacturers still need the same ingredient quality, at volumes they can actually buy, with someone who understands their recipes. His vision is a regional value-added distributor that becomes the go-to link between ingredient majors and SME manufacturers, known for clean ingredients, traceable supply and hands-on application support. That gives local food and beverage makers a dependable route to the ingredients and technical help their products rely on.
Mission
Jérôme's mission is to partner with the founder of an independent speciality food ingredients distributor in Benelux and Northern France and lead the business into its next chapter. He is looking for a company with genuine application capability, and plans to sharpen its portfolio around natural ingredients, deepen its formulation and application support, and use AI to strengthen pricing, compliance and traceability. Relationships with principals and customers sit at the heart of this kind of business, so continuity matters as much as change.
Impact
Across very different settings, Jérôme's work follows one pattern: simplifying how suppliers, operations and cash flow fit together, then building the team to sustain it. He has consolidated contract manufacturing for a product category, renegotiated major supplier contracts, and built a lending operation from scratch, from credit decision to collections, with more than 70% of its clients returning for further funding. As a lender, he has read the cash flow of more than 70 agri and food SMEs, which shapes how he judges a business. Applied to a speciality ingredients distributor, that experience points to the platform he wants to build: disciplined relationships with principals, reliable service for smaller manufacturers and a clear view of cashflow.
Expertise
Procurement and supplier management, commercial operations, contract manufacturing, operating model and supply chain transformation, agri-food policy and analytics, SME finance and credit, team building, international operations across Europe, Africa and Asia. His strengths cut across buying, operations and working capital, the disciplines a speciality ingredients distributor depends on.