FS6 Team

Our Team

The Food System 6 team is a passionate group of food-industry change-agents working together to support the FS6 mission and entrepreneurs. You can learn more about what we're working on and where we came from by navigating to the Linkedin profiles connected to each team member.

FS6 Team

Caesaré Assad
Chief Executive Officer

Over the last 20 years, Caesaré has developed and led several food business innovations to address social and environmental challenges. Her expertise spans the private, non-profit, and corporate sectors, with a range of hands-on, operational leadership roles as a chef, entrepreneur, and business executive. Her experience includes launching back-to-back start-up concepts for Whole Foods Market, co-founding The Cleaver Group - a food environment design consultancy, developing culinary career programs for youth, groups, and launching nutrition-based wellness and foodservice concepts around the US for private and corporate clients. As a native to rural Oklahoma, she is especially passionate about surfacing and supporting issues that impact small communities.

Perri Kramer
Program Director

Perri has led Marketing and Operation teams, as well as product launches, in the organic food industry for over a decade. Prior to joining Food System 6, Perri worked for Whole Foods Market, Revolution Foods, and for restaurant and food marketing consultancies. An early passion for cooking led her to study food equity and farming and ultimately to build a career working with ethical businesses that support sustainable food systems. Still a deeply invested home cook and avid dinner party host, Perri brings communities together by celebrating good food and, in her free time, develops recipes for a local community supported fishery. Perri holds B.A. degrees from The Colorado College in History & Political Science as well as a concentration in Agro-Ecology.

Melissa Rouse
Communications Director

Melissa is a writer and editor with a passion for food system change. She is dedicated to supporting small and mid-sized organizations with big-picture plans for the betterment of local and global food communities.

Growing up in a beekeeping family on the Big Island of Hawaii, Melissa has been immersed in the food and agriculture world since day one - and has been captivated by the challenges and opportunities that this industry creates. By turning her editorial background towards the FoodAg space, Melissa has been able to combine her skill and passion; she is excited to be partnering with Food System 6 as they work to transform the traditional structures of this age-old industry.

Melissa has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Meredith Fenton
Storytelling

Meredith Fenton has been working in and with social change organizations her entire career. As an independent consultant based in Oakland, she provides coaching, training, and strategy to progressive organizations and leaders so our movements can better leverage tools of communication, storytelling, and culture for social change.

In addition to her work as the Storytelling Coach for FS6, she partners change makers around the country including Latino Community Foundation, Define American, The Hood Incubator, Perinatal Equity Initiative, Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, and the Trust Based Philanthropy Project. Outside of her business, Meredith serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Californians for Justice and volunteers with groups such as Seed the Vote and the Wellesley College Board of Admissions.

Julianne Kennedy
Program and Communications Manager

Julianne is a lifelong learner passionate about leveraging insights of behavioral science and conflict resolution to guide decision making and scaffold healthier social patterns. She looks forward to opportunities to create solutions from complexity, and bring approachability to challenging topics through strategic storytelling.

Prior to joining the Food System 6 team, she applied her training in empathy-based intervention as an AmeriCorps teacher in Chicago- providing one-on-one instruction and behavioral support in 5th-8th grade classrooms. As a conference planner, she managed multiple virtual learning programs and enjoyed coaching speakers in preparation for their presentations.

She received her B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and embraces the possibility for conflict to be an incredible agent of change when navigated intentionally. She believes in the healing power of food, nature, and movement.

Patrick Ahern
Chief Operations Officer

Patrick is an operations and business development professional who has helped local businesses achieve sustainable solutions. Over the past 15+ years, Patrick’s expertise includes experience in both B2B and B2C markets, with a focus on business development, procurement and distribution, project management, restaurant equipment and design, systems creation, market analysis, and biogas driven power generation.

Originally from the Midwest and having lived on both coasts with 2 cross country trips under his belt, Patrick’s desire for new experiences is resolute. He is enriched by his community in the traditional ways of amazing food, great parties, and most recently fireside chats with friends, family, and neighbors.

He has a Bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in Political Science with a specialization in Public Administration and Masters of Business Administration in Sustainable Enterprise from Dominican University.

dimiter gurdjilov
Program PArtner

Dimiter is a circular economy enthusiast and has been a Managing Partner of Challenger Capital Partner since 2011. He has more than 18 years of investment banking, private equity and turnaround experience. From 2006 to 2010, he served as Investment Director at NBGI Private Equity, based in London, where he was involved in a number of private equity transactions. Prior to NBGI Private Equity, he was Vice President at Bedminster Capital. Before joining Bedminster in 2004, he worked at JPMorgan, where he worked in investment banking and covered a number of regions and industries, including natural resources, energy and infrastructure. Prior to that, he worked in New York in the areas of Telecommunications, Media and Technology. Dimiter received his BA from the American University in Bulgaria and earned his MBA from the University of Miami.

FS6 Residence Program
The FS6 Residence Program is a co-designed experience that places an expert and leader in the role of mentor and coach to help FS6 advance their advance their holistic model for founder support, as well as to provide an environment for the Resident to explore their own body of work. The Residents draw upon their many years of experience to complement and expand upon FS6’s custom work with our teams and the FS6 mission overall. The Residents may also provide mentorship to the FS6 team, as we continuously seek new and better ways to equip our next generation of leaders with the skills they need to be successful. FS6 typically provides a stipend to the resident and we are open to creative and thoughtful partnerships. Inquiries regarding these roles may be sent to us at FS6@foodsystem6.org.

Andrew FAlcon
Entrepreneur In Residence

Andrew brings extensive commercial, operations, and entrepreneurial expertise to his role as Entrepreneur in Residence at Food System 6. Andrew’s work in biomaterials, packaging, organic waste valorization, and international development, together with his roots in Midwestern family-farming, combine to give him a unique perspective on the intersection of food/agriculture and adjacent sectors at the systems level.

Andrew is passionate in his belief that circular, regenerative solutions are essential for the long-term health of the planet, and that entrepreneurs, innovation and markets have the best chance to catalyze system-level change. Andrew lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children, often can be found behind a grill at home or at the family farm in Iowa, and holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Learn more about Andrew on his LinkedIn.

Doug Beacom
Entrepreneur in residence

Doug is an educator, operator, leader and relentless champion of imagination and the human experience with and around food. After a decade in K-12, nonformal and project-based learning, his family started their adventure in food as WWOOF apprentices on a goat farm in Santa Cruz County in 2011. While in Santa Cruz, Doug led the creative contract farming, innovative packaging and co-manufacturing initiatives that helped scale Farmhouse Culture to a national fermented foods brand. Later, he moved to Sonoma County to serve in plant leadership roles for Miyoko’s Creamery and Revive Kombucha.

With experience ranging from raw sauerkraut to snack chips, and mozzarella to adaptogens, Doug was VP of Manufacturing with Siddhi Ops, where he led outsourced commercialization, manufacturing and optimization projects with a variety of brands across multiple platforms, distribution channels and stages of growth.

When he’s not in a facility figuring out how to get it made, he can be found home fermenting, gardening, cycling and homeschooling with his family.

Learn more about Doug on his LinkedIn.

Christine Su
Entrepreneur in residence

Christine is the former CEO and co-founder of PastureMap, a grazing management software company used on over 6 million acres globally, to help ranchers increase profitability while building healthy grasslands. Christine built the company from zero to profitability, and a successful exit to SoilWorks Natural Capital. She serves on the board of Kitchen Table Advisors, a California nonprofit serving 80%+ women farmers and farmers of color.

Learn more about Christine on her LinkedIn.

Rishi Nijhon
Therapist IN RESIDENCE

Rishi has 10+ years as a medical psychotherapist working within a variety of healthcare organisations and has provided direct clinical care to thousands of patients throughout the state of California. His current position at Kaiser Permanente has put him at the heart of the community and has sparked a passion to bring fundamental change to the institutional systems that deeply impact the emotional and mental health of the individual immersed within them. Rishi has committed himself to the study of plant medicine as a means to bring about individual and collective transformation. He recently received certification in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy and Research from the California Institute of Integral Studies and aspires to apply this education widely to facilitate systemic change, cultivate hope, and radically change the perspectives of how we approach decisions that impact the health, wellness, and dignity of the individual and the planet we all share.

Learn more about Rishi on LinkedIn.

Ethan Rublee
ENTREPRENEUR IN RESIDENCE

Ethan is a serial entrepreneur, technologist, aspiring farmer and, is passionate about applying computer vision, machine learning and robotics to empower farmers and local food systems to heal people and the planet. Ethan has worked in Silicon Valley for the past decade, developing open source computer vision software Willow Garage, making robots unload trucks and move pallets around a warehouse at Google, and providing machine learning based tools for artists in Hollywood. In 2020, Ethan moved his family to an 11 acre upstart farm in Watsonville, CA- just an hour and a world away from Silicon Valley. Ethan is currently running an online farmers market on the Central Coast, and founding his next company on the farm- farm-ng inc. with a focus of bringing low-cost robotics to farmers everywhere.

Learn more about Ethan on his LinkedIn.

Loretta oden
Elder in Residence

Loretta Oden, host of Emmy-winning Seasoned With Spirit, began her passionate relationship with food as a small child at the side of her Mother, Grandmothers and Aunts in Oklahoma. She’s spent the past thirty + years, cooking, studying, teaching and adapting recipes to preserve the culinary legacy of her upbringing. In the 1990s, she and her Son, the late chef Clayton Oden, opened the Corn Dance Cafe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first restaurant to showcase the bounty of food indigenous to the Americas.
Loretta has served as a food consultant for the Yocha DeHe-Wintun Nation, San Juan Pueblo, Taos County Economic Development Center and the Tohono O’odham Nation as well as creating menus for numerous Native American events such as NCAI, Oklahoma History Center, Red Earth Festival, Michigan State University, Forest County Potawatomi, Gun Lake Potawatomi and many, many others. She worked with Francis Ford Coppola as a restaurant consultant as well as with several luxury resort venues in California, Arizona and Colorado. Working with many chefs over the years has broadened her culinary skills while creating opportunities for her to spread her knowledge of Native food culture to a broader audience.

LEARN MORE ABOUT LORETTA ON LINKEDIN.

Board of Directors