Last updated: 14-07-2026

Meet the Speakers of Hybrid Foods Europe 2026: 24 Leaders Across Retail, Ingredients, and Policy

Twenty-four speakers, three days, and every function a hybrid product needs to pass through on its way to a European shelf. Below is the full lineup confirmed on FoodConNext Foundation's speakers page, organised the way the conference itself runs: by day and by session.

Who's Speaking at Hybrid Foods Europe 2026?

Hybrid Foods Europe 2026 brings together 24 confirmed speakers from retail, food service, ingredient supply, manufacturing, NGO and policy research, and market intelligence across three days in Amsterdam, 14–16 September. The lineup spans household retail names (Albert Heijn, Lidl), global ingredient suppliers (ADM, Beneo, IFF, Cosun Beet Company, Crespel & Deiters), consumer-research and NGO voices (Wageningen University, ProVeg International, WWF, Madre Brava), and the manufacturers and formulators actually building hybrid products (PlanetDairy, Hilton Foods, Farm Dairy, Fava Studio, Red Rabbit, Innovate.NU).

The Chairs Setting the Agenda

Michel Mellema (Global Innovation Director, IFF) chairs both conference days alongside Jaap Harkema and Gerard Klein Essink, Co-Founders of FoodConNext Foundation. Mellema opens and closes each day's programme and leads the Strategy Conclusions session on Day One. Harkema and Klein Essink built the FoodConNext community that convenes this speaker roster in the first place — Klein Essink also co-chairs the welcome and closing sessions on both days.

Day One — Retail & Food Service Strategy (15 September)

Day One runs eleven sessions from the Planetary Health Diet case for hybrid foods through to a closing panel on the consumer bar for chilled hybrid meat, with fourteen speakers covering health, climate, retail, and regulatory angles in sequence.

Joanna Trewern, Director Partnerships at ProVeg International, opens the day's content with the Planetary Health Diet perspective — how hybrid meat and dairy products can lower emissions and improve affordability while fitting into mainstream European retail.

Nico Muzi, Co-Founder of Madre Brava, and Stella Hoynalanmaa, Director Food Programme at WWF, follow with the climate case: what European retailers' protein goals actually look like, and what governments can and cannot do to make them achievable.

Ananda Roy, SVP Global Thought Leadership at Circana, brings the demand-trend view — plant-based and hybrid landscape data, 2026 demand trends, and what separates products that win from products that stall.

Jakob Skovgaard, Co-Founder & CEO of PlanetDairy, covers the European hybrid dairy retailing outlook: how hybrid cheeses, milks, and yoghurts unlock commercial opportunities from a margin and category-growth perspective.

Jos Havekotte, Founder of Innovate.NU, takes the hybrid meat opportunity session — where blended meat-plant products win first, and what it takes to build scalable concepts consumers actually adopt.

Chantal Goenee, CSR at Lidl, and Marleen Onwezen, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Wageningen University, present their joint Lidl–Wageningen research on the strategic consumer challenge: getting hybrid positioning and placement right.

Niels Hower, Member of the Executive Board at Beneo, addresses the missing ingredient in category building — consumer acceptance — covering language, trust, and how insight turns into category growth.

Andre Limmer, Founder of nextFood.ai, and Christopher Busch, Head of R&D at Crespel & Deiters Group, cover the wider B2B hybrid ingredients opportunity — meeting taste and texture needs while adding health, footprint, and affordability to the value proposition.

Hubert Lehnard, Head of Business Unit at Elsa Group, and Roland Snel, Technical Director Proteins at ADM, take hybrid meat food service solutions further — what Europe can learn from North America and what's next for food service.

Hans Zijlstra (Farm Dairy), Laura Goossens-van den Heuvel (Eurofins Food Safety Solutions), and Martine van Haperen (ProVeg Nederland) close out the regulatory session on naming, claims, and labelling — where EU rules on dairy and meat names create the sharpest mislabelling risk for hybrid products.

The day closes with a panel on the consumer bar for chilled hybrid meat by 2028, featuring Henk van Os (Albert Heijn), Vincent van Kuijen (Hilton Foods Holland), and Fabian Griens (Cosun Beet Company), before Michel Mellema wraps the day's strategy conclusions.

Day Two — Product Innovation and the Innovation Plaza (16 September)

Day Two opens with hybrid dairy formulation and moves into the Innovation Plaza, a three-hour hands-on session where delegates taste and discuss formulations directly with the companies behind them.

Dennis Favier, Founder & Owner of Fava Studio, opens the day covering the big challenges in hybrid dairy formulation and where the current quality bar sits for consumers.

The Innovation Plaza that follows puts eleven ingredient and formulation partners in front of delegates directly: hybrid cheese and dairy from PlanetDairy, hybrid dairy from Farm Dairy, hybrid meat from Smaqo and Innovate.NU, wheat and pea proteins from Crespel & Deiters, soy from ADM, sugar beet and faba bean ingredients from Cosun, textured flakes and fibres from Beneo, mycoproteins from Planetary, mushroom ingredients from 50Cut by JOYN Foods, mushrooms from Scelta, and new processing technologies from JBT Marel. Jochen Matzer, CEO & Founder of Red Rabbit, rounds out the hybrid meat brand voices present across the two days.

Michel Mellema and Gerard Klein Essink close the conference with a strategic wrap-up following the Hybrid Value Chain Outlook 2028 expert panel.

Table: Speaker Lineup at a Glance

Take-Home Messages

Commercial:

• The Day One agenda moves in the order a hybrid decision actually gets made: health and climate case, then demand data, then retail and food service commercialisation, then regulation — a useful sequence for structuring your own internal hybrid business case.

• Retail (Albert Heijn, Lidl) and NGO/policy voices (ProVeg, WWF, Madre Brava) sharing the same agenda signals hybrid has moved from a formulation conversation to a retail-shelf conversation.

• The Innovation Plaza's eleven ingredient partners represent the fastest way to compare formulation options — mycoprotein, soy, pea, sugar beet, mushroom — side by side rather than supplier by supplier.

• The 17:30–18:30 one-on-one networking slot and Community Dinner built into Day One's schedule exist specifically to convert these sessions into direct supplier and retailer introductions.

  
  

Technical:

• The regulatory session (Zijlstra, Goossens-van den Heuvel, van Haperen) is the single best session for understanding current EU naming and labelling risk for hybrid dairy and meat claims.

• The joint Lidl–Wageningen consumer positioning project is a rare case of a retailer and an academic consumer-behaviour group running the same study together, rather than sequentially.

• Circana's demand-trend session is best used to sanity-check a formulation brief before, not after, ingredient sourcing decisions are made.

• The Innovation Plaza's side-by-side tasting format (cooking performance, shelf life, colour, animal-to-non-animal protein ratio) is designed to separate genuine functionality gains from marketing claims.

  
  

Why This Speaker Lineup Matters for Your Hybrid Strategy

A hybrid strategy built from press releases and ingredient data sheets alone misses the retail, regulatory, and consumer-acceptance layers that actually decide whether a product survives its first year on shelf. This lineup — retailers, ingredient suppliers, NGOs, researchers, and manufacturers in the same three days — is built to close that gap directly.

Verdict & Next Step

Twenty-four speakers across three days is not a coincidence of scheduling — it is FoodConNext Foundation's attempt to put every function a hybrid product depends on in one room at the same time. Whichever piece of the value chain your team is missing, it is very likely on this stage.

Hybrid Foods Europe runs 14–16 September 2026 at Van der Valk Zuidas, Amsterdam. Register for Hybrid Foods Europe to meet this full speaker lineup in person, before the programme's networking slots and Innovation Plaza sessions fill.

About Gerard Klein Essink

Gerard Klein Essink is the Founder and CEO of FoodConNext Foundation. He has run an international plant-based foods and proteins community for more than 20 years, published numerous industry reports, authored innovation reports on proteins for the Dutch government, advised the Canadian government on its pulse strategy, and produced strategic outlook reports for Pulse Canada and the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation.

About FoodConNext Foundation

At FoodConNext Foundation, we believe that the future of food lies at the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and global collaboration. Our foundation is dedicated to accelerating the transition toward more resilient and responsible food systems by connecting key stakeholders across the agri-food ecosystem.

Our Mission

FoodConNext Foundation exists to bridge gaps in the global food system — bringing together entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and investors to co-create solutions that address some of the world's most pressing challenges, including food security, sustainability, and nutrition.