Amy Klein, Guest Innovator at the CIA's Food Business School

Amy Klein

SpoonfulOne

As a food innovator, Amy’s experience and successes sit at the crossroads of food, strategy, and brand to develop market performing products and scalable businesses. Amy has spent the last 15 years, in the food industry, leading innovation and product development teams in both the food service, meal kit, and CPG channels. Amy’s career is focused on new to this world approaches to solving ever-evolving consumer needs, with an eye to emerging agricultural and processing technologies while delivering products that delight. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with many big players in the food world, i.e. the Mars Global Innovation Group, Dannon, McCormick’s, Stoneyfield, Heinz, Organic Valley, and Panera Bread.

Currently, Amy heads up the Product Development group for SpoonfulOne, a start-up creating new food products focused on food allergy prevention so children and families can eat freely and without fear. Prior to SpoonfulOne, she was the Founding Executive Chef and VP of Innovation Projects at Revolution Foods, joining the co-founders to disrupt the status quo in the $18 billion school food service marketplace. As a member of the executive team, Amy lead a cross functional team who created a new food platform for the industry. With Amy’s pursuit of culinary excellence and business acumen, Revolution Foods has delivered access to kid-inspired, chef-crafted meals nationwide and achieved rapid growth with $150M in revenue.

Outside the kitchen, she has extensive experience working with food leaders to identify how to create scalable, sustainable food systems and was three times sent as a delegate to Slow Foods Terra Madre in Turin, Italy. Four years running, she hosted an officers class from the National Defense University, formally the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and received civilian accommodation for her work with them on scalable, safe, and clean supply chain and nutrition. She attended culinary school at San Francisco’s Tante Marie’s in North Beach and worked in fine dining. She ran a successful catering business and was a chef instructor. She has a BA from Lewis and Clark College.