Saving Food, Fighting Food Waste

Doug Cole

Doug Cole is the Senior Manager of Marketing and Biotech Affairs at Simplot Plant Sciences located in Boise, Idaho. In this capacity, Cole is responsible for building consumer, academic and potato industry acceptance for the Innate® biotech potato as well as new technology initiatives.

Under his leadership, the Innate® first and second generation potatoes have received support from leading potato research institutions, major U.S. potato producing grower associations and approval from the USDA, FDA and EPA. In 2015, Innate® technology was integrated into the White Russet™ fresh market potato which has sold in over 40 U.S. states, becoming the World’s first commercialized biotech potato with consumer traits.

Doug began his career at Simplot in 2012 after 14 years in technology marketing and corporate communications at Hewlett-Packard. Doug has a BA in government from St. Lawrence University.

Tim Ma

Tim Ma is owner and executive chef of American Son, the flagship restaurant of the Eaton Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C.

Tim was working as an electrical engineer in the Washington, D.C. area until 2008, when he and his wife Joey quit their jobs and followed their passions to New York City, where he enrolled in The French Culinary Institute (now known as The International Culinary Center).

After completing his training, and an externship at a Two-Michelin Starred Restaurant in New York, Tim and Joey returned to the DMV, and with the help of family and friends (and several maxed-out credit cards) opened a restaurant of their very own, which didn’t take too long before it began to garner the attention of locals and critics. In 2013, Tim and Joey opened Water & Wall, a neighborhood joint specializing in modern American fare.

Two years after that, Chase the Submarine, Tim’s passion project/craft sub shop, became another successful enterprise. A year after that, (he was busy, to say the least) the Tim Ma Restaurant Group (TMRG) opened its first restaurant in DC: Kyirisan, which was recognized on Michelin’s inaugural ‘Bib Gourmand’ DC list, and Washingtonian’s elite ‘2017 100 Very Best Restaurants’ list within its first year of opening. In the fall of 2016, a mere eight years after deciding to pursue his dreams, a culinary consulting extension of TMRG was launched. In August 2018, Tim opened his current restaurant American Son in the Eaton Hotel.

Outside of the kitchen, Chef Tim is the proud father of Charlotte, 6; Chase, 4; and Camden, 2 – all future "Yellow Jackets.”

Monica McBride

Monica McBride serves as Manager of Food Loss & Waste at World Wildlife Fund. Monica joined WWF in January 2017 and has been managing the Food Waste team’s portfolio of projects including demonstration projects focused on food waste reduction in the hospitality and restaurant sectors, quantifying on-farm loss of specialty crops in the US, and working with leading retailers to understand their current scope of food loss and waste in order to implement zero waste merchandising strategies. Monica’s expertise includes product level life cycle assessments, value chain greenhouse gas quantifications, sustainable supply chain strategy development, and waste management and sustainable agriculture policy evaluation and implementation. Monica has worked extensively on the development of appropriate metrics and quantification approaches for capturing both the economic and environmental benefits of supply chain and internal sustainability initiatives for retail, consumer product companies, and agriculture producers.

Danielle Vogel

Danielle Vogel, the founder of Glen’s Garden Market, comes from a long line of grocers, stretching back four generations.

Before founding Glen’s, Danielle worked in government for ten years, as a policy adviser to both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, as well as for the Department of Justice as an environmental litigator enforcing the Clean Air Act. When the effort to pass comprehensive climate legislation failed, she dedicated herself to finding a new, more incremental way to address global warming: engaging her community in the Good Food movement.

In its first six years, Glen’s launched over 80 sustainability focused food businesses, of which nearly 50 are woman-owned and more than 20 were founded by people of color. The store is solar powered and generates no food waste. Nearly everything on the shelves is sourced locally. Glen’s Garden Market is a truly activated community center. Danielle hosts a weekly radio show called Everyday Enviro about ways to reduce our personal carbon footprint, and she founded a business pitch competition called AccelerateHERdc, to identify, incubate and accelerate lady-led, sustainability minded, small-batch, local food companies.