An Elite, Non-Fiduciary Brain Trust.

Brad Barnes, CMC, AAC

Culinary & Agriculture

Brad Barnes is a Certified Master Chef, a 50-year veteran of the professional kitchen, and President of Pure Food Consulting. He specializes in strategic business development — helping international food businesses and multinational companies bring new product lines to market, implement sustainable food tactics, and re-envision their global operations. In 2022, Chef Barnes retired as Senior Director of Consulting and Industry Programs at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), where he oversaw all non-degree programming, operational consulting, and ProChef Certification. A 1987 CIA graduate, his tenure at the college also included serving as Senior Director of Culinary Education. Before the CIA, he founded GigaChef, LLC and co-owned the operational-consulting firm B&B Solutions, and served as executive chef for numerous commercial restaurant groups. One of only 72 Certified Master Chefs in the United States, Barnes is a former ACF National Certification Commission chair, co-author of three culinary books, and a multi-gold-medal winner at the Culinary Olympics. He remains an active partner in multiple U.S. food businesses.

Certification, Competition & Consulting Experience

Barnes holds one of the profession’s rarest credentials: the American Culinary Federation’s Certified Master Chef designation, earned through an eight-day comprehensive practical examination that fewer than seventy-five chefs in the country have ever passed. He has channeled that mastery into competition and mentorship at the highest levels, serving as coach and design director for United States culinary Olympic teams across the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Games in Germany, where his own honors include two Culinary Olympic gold medals and the Saint Michel Gold Medal for Pastry Display. Within the ACF he has chaired both the national Certified Master Chef Committee and the National Certification Commission, and he judges at the highest tier as an ACF-certified evaluator and an international judge accredited by the World Association of Chefs Societies. His industry service has been recognized with the ACF President’s Award and the Hermann G. Rusch Humanitarian Award. Through Pure Food Consulting he now brings that combination of technical rigor, competition-tested discipline, and operational insight to food companies worldwide — the same standard of measurable excellence and credentialed integrity that mOrganic applies to building verified products and programs from the ground up. His consulting practice now spans manufacturers, multinational chains, and emerging food brands across four continents.

Mark Linder

Culinary & Agriculture

Mark Linder brings more than thirty-five years of service to California and American agriculture, built on foundations that run deep: he was raised on a sixth-generation family farm in Iowa and is a graduate of Iowa State University. He is co-founder of Culinary Sciences, a FoodTech company whose rapid-chill vacuum-cooling equipment safely and quickly cools food for foodservice operators. For over two decades he served as Agriculture Liaison for the Culinary Institute of America, a role the college created for him in 2003 to bridge the worlds of farming and fine cuisine. Earlier in his career he spent twenty-three years with the California Farm Bureau, where he helped establish agricultural-education programs that continue to reach students today. He currently holds advisory and leadership roles with mOrganic, Rural Development Partners, Culinary One Investments, Emergent Connext, Full Harvest, and 78, Inc., where his focus remains connecting rural producers with urban markets and the culinary community.

Agricultural Education & Institution-Building Experience

Few advisors have done more to connect the farm and the table at a national scale. Linder co-founded and served as President and CEO of Food, Land & People, an educational nonprofit that fosters informed dialogue about food production, environmental quality, and sustainability, and he co-founded and was first president of California’s Agriculture in the Classroom program, which continues to bring agricultural literacy to schoolchildren across the state. He is a co-founder of America’s Heartland, the award-winning public-television series celebrating American farmers and ranchers that has aired more than 378,000 times across more than 1,000 PBS stations. As founder and chief executive of Culinary One Investments, he channels that lifetime of relationships into building and backing ventures at the intersection of agriculture, food technology, and cuisine. His counsel is sought across the sector: he has served on the boards of the California Institute of Food and Agricultural Research, the American Farmland Trust’s California Stewardship Council, and the UC Davis Olive Center, and he recently joined the advisory board of the agricultural-technology company Agrology. For mOrganic, Linder offers a rare, systems-level view of how regenerative production, education, and market access reinforce one another. A consistent through-line connects this work: making the case for agriculture to the public and to future generations — the connective infrastructure the platform is built to scale.

Waldy Malouf

Culinary & Agriculture

Waldy Malouf is a renowned chef, restaurateur, author, and educator whose career began at age 13 cooking alongside European chefs at a Florida country club. A 1975 graduate of The Culinary Institute of America, he won First Prize in the Carras Culinary Competition at New York’s “21” Club before building an esteemed career in New York City through partnerships and executive roles at storied establishments including The Rainbow Room, Windows on the World, The Hudson River Club, The Four Seasons Restaurant, La Côte Basque, and the St. Regis Hotel — earning three stars from The New York Times at the Rainbow Room in 1997, a first for that institution. An innovator in open-fire and wood-fired cooking, he is the author of The Hudson River Valley Cookbook (1996) and High Heat: Grilling and Roasting (2004), served as Senior Director of CIA Food & Beverage Operations from 2013 to 2023, and today leads his own hospitality consulting firm as principal of WDM Hospitality Management.

Venture-Building & Concept Development Experience

Across his career, Malouf has repeatedly conceived, launched, and scaled hospitality concepts from the ground up. He opened Beacon, a restaurant and wholesale bread bakery, in New York City in 1999 to critical and commercial acclaim, then successfully replicated the concept with a second Beacon in Stamford, Connecticut, in 2000 — both earning multiple three-star reviews. He went on to pioneer the use of wood-fired ovens in New York City with Waldy’s Wood Roasted Pizza in 2005, a concept that thrived through 2021, and extended the brand with High Heat Pizza Burgers & Tap in Greenwich Village in 2012. As Senior Director of CIA Food & Beverage Operations, he brought that operator’s discipline to an institutional scale, renovating or opening ten restaurants across the college’s three domestic campuses and participated in the re-opening of all four domestic campuses following the COVID-19 pandemic. Through WDM Hospitality Management he has also developed food and beverage concepts for clients including Northwest/KLM Airlines, working alongside leading architects, designers, and financial experts to bring new concepts to market. Beyond the commercial realm, he co-founded the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund after 9/11, building an organization that raised more than $23 million for the families of food-service workers killed in the attacks.

Dr. Shane Burgess

Scientific Research

Dr. Shane Burgess — University of Arizona (UA) Dean Emeritus and immediate past Vice President for the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences, the Arizona Experiment Stations, and Arizona Cooperative Extension — has 37 years’ experience bridging high-performance computing and cutting-edge genomics with regenerative agriculture, leading in the public and private sectors across five countries. At UA he created the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture, the Natural Resource Users Law and Policy Center, and the School of Nutritional Sciences and Wellness. A DVM whose Ph.D. (completed while working in biotech) spans cancer biology, immunology, and virology, he has over 200 academic publications, multiple invention disclosures, patents, licenses, and copyrights — combining extensive academic institutional leadership with commercial pragmatism. Burgess’ career uniquely bridges academic leadership, entrepreneurial initiative, and public-private partnership execution. While completing his radiology residency at Murdoch University, he co-founded Western Australia’s first emergency veterinary clinic in Perth. He led the working group that privatized Tucson’s Reid Park Zoological Gardens, serving as inaugural Governing Board Vice Chair and then Chair. Throughout his 14-year tenure as UA Vice President and Dean, he architected multiple high-impact public-private partnerships — including YCEDA, the NRULPC, and a county-wide COVID-19 testing facility recognized by the CDC as a national model. He established Arizona’s first public College of Veterinary Medicine entirely without state investment and its first Corporate Relations unit, securing collaborations with Akzo Nobel, Cobb Breeding Company, Eli Lilly, and the British Egg Marketing Board, while co-chairing the US-EU Working Group on Animal Biotechnology to launch the international FAANG consortium.

Samantha Holroyd

Scientific Research

Samantha Holroyd is an impactful corporate advisory and investment professional with extensive experience leading strategy, capital raising, governance, and technical diligence across energy and infrastructure markets. A Registered Professional Engineer who holds a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, she began her career as a reservoir engineer at Atlantic Richfield and Tenneco before advancing to Global Reserves Audit Manager at Shell, and she is certified by the National Association of Corporate Directors in both corporate governance and ESG. As Founder of Golden Advisory Services, she advises clients on corporate strategy, enterprise risk, sustainability integration, innovation, and long-term value creation. Previously, as Managing Director at Lantana Energy Advisors, she originated buy-side and sell-side mandates totaling $800 million and led multidisciplinary teams delivering technical diligence and valuation, and at TPG Sixth Street Partners she helped establish the Houston office and oversaw diligence across more than 40 evaluated transactions, including $1.1 billion in operating investment structures. An independent director of Chord Energy since 2020, she has served as Lead Independent Director, Chair of the Nominating & ESG Committee, and Chair of the Safety and Sustainability Committee during a period in which the company’s market capitalization more than tripled, and she has held board seats at Oasis Petroleum, Gulfport Energy, and Amerant Bancorp. As Chief Commercial Officer of ZeroSix, she helped build the commercial model and methodology for high-integrity voluntary carbon credits from the retirement of end-of-life oil and gas wells — directly relevant to mOrganic’s carbon-removal program. Her expertise builds on more than fifteen years in energy and infrastructure private equity.

Dr. Rajiv “Raj” Ratan

Scientific Research

Rajiv (“Raj”) R. Ratan, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist, academic leader, and biotechnology executive with more than three decades of experience advancing neuroscience research and translational medicine. He is the Burke Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine and has served for over 20 years as executive director and CEO of the Burke Neurological Institute, where he led scientific strategy, institutional growth, and partnerships across academia, philanthropy, and industry. A graduate of Amherst College and the NYU School of Medicine (MD, PhD), he trained and served as Chief Resident in Neurology at Johns Hopkins Hospital before joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he founded the Neuroprotection Laboratory prior to being recruited in 2003 to lead Burke as its second director. His laboratory investigates how neurons respond to oxidative stress at the transcriptional level and has identified novel transcriptional and epigenetic strategies for limiting neuronal ferroptosis — validated across models of stroke, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases. He was principal investigator of an eleven-institution Center of Research Excellence in Spinal Cord Injury funded by $15 million from the New York State Department of Health, and in 2019 he co-founded NeuroCuresNY, a novel clinical-trials platform. A Reviewing Editor of The Journal of Neuroscience, Senior Associate Editor of Neurotherapeutics, and a member of the editorial boards of Neurobiology of Disease and Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, he was elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and serves on the advisory board of the Dana Brain Health Alliance, with more than 200 scientific publications to his name.

Scott Perrin

Business & Capital Strategy

Scott Perrin is the Founder and Managing Member of The Event Office, a boutique special-event production firm that creates fundraising campaigns and benefits for many of New York’s leading charitable organizations. Under his leadership the firm has produced hundreds of galas, golf outings, charity auctions, and cultivation events that have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the nonprofit sector, and its credits extend to occasions as prominent as a U.S. Presidential inauguration and Grammy Awards celebrations. Before founding The Event Office, Scott served as Director of Special Events at Lenox Hill Hospital, building the fundraising infrastructure for one of the city’s major medical institutions. His civic and governance experience is equally deep: he has served on Brown University’s Board of Governors and as President of The Brown University Club in New York, and he has chaired committees at Trinity School, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, and the theater company En Garde Arts. He brings that rare blend of development strategy, board-level governance, donor cultivation, and disciplined execution to every engagement he leads.

Broadway & Off-Broadway Producing Experience

Beyond the philanthropic world, Scott is an accomplished theatrical producer whose work has been hailed by The New York Times as among the best in New York in years. He produced Rodgers & Hammerstein’s A Grand Night for Singing, which moved from the Rainbow & Stars cabaret to Broadway and earned two Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. His Off-Broadway credits include The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Our Sinatra, and Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know, along with a celebrated series of critically acclaimed tributes to the giants of the American songbook — Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jule Styne, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein. Raised in the entertainment industry as the son of an orchestra leader and a comedy writer, Scott combines a producer’s instinct for storytelling and audience with a fundraiser’s discipline for measurable results. For mOrganic, he offers a distinctive capacity to translate the company’s mission into compelling experiences that move audiences, cultivate relationships, and mobilize capital in support of a cause.

Dr. Christophe Morin

Business & Capital Strategy

Dr. Christophe Morin is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, author, and pioneer in the field of neuromarketing. He is the co-founder and Chief Persuasion Scientist of SalesBrain, the world’s first neuromarketing agency, and has spent more than two decades helping organizations understand the neuroscience of persuasion, decision-making, and behavior change. His proprietary NeuroMap™ model bridges neuroscience and consumer psychology to explain how brands connect with audiences on a primal level, combining neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and business strategy to advise and train executives across hundreds of organizations worldwide. Christophe is the co-author of The Persuasion Code — winner of the 2019 Axiom Business Book Award — as well as Neuromarketing AI and The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide, and he serves as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches courses on AI and neuromarketing. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Psychology with a concentration in neuropsychology from Fielding Graduate University and an M.B.A. in Marketing Research from Bowling Green State University, and his honors include the Advertising Research Foundation’s Great Mind Research Award and recognition as a Vistage international Speaker of the Year.

Acquisition & Strategic Exit Experience

While Christophe is best known today for his scientific work, his direct involvement with acquisitions and exits came earlier in his career. During his tenure with a French-based flag-manufacturing company pursuing international expansion, he identified, evaluated, negotiated, and completed acquisitions on the company’s behalf — including transactions in both the United States and Australia — gaining hands-on experience in cross-border deal sourcing, diligence, and integration. In 2000, he joined RSTAR Networks, where he served on the executive team that steered the company through a difficult strategic transition amid the collapse of the post-dot-com market, a process that ultimately culminated in the sale of the company’s assets in 2002. Those formative experiences — sourcing targets, structuring deals, and navigating a full exit under real market pressure — give Christophe a practitioner’s understanding of how enterprise value is built, defended, and realized. For mOrganic, he pairs that transactional grounding with a rare command of the science of human decision-making, informing how the company communicates its regenerative model to partners, investors, and customers.

Alex Baxter

Business & Capital Strategy

Alex Baxter is a senior supply chain executive with more than three decades of field and headquarters leadership in fast-paced, complex consumer products environments. Over a 30-year career at PepsiCo, he rose from a production and maintenance manager to Senior Vice President of Supply Chain for North American Beverages’ North Division, where he led end-to-end operations for a $4 billion unit spanning 15 manufacturing plants, a $600 million P&L, and 300 million cases handled annually. Along the way he served as Vice President of Supply Chain Planning for North American Nutrition and Beverages — directing demand and supply planning for over 1.5 billion cases across more than 100 manufacturing sites — and held a series of plant director and operations roles marked by consistent turnarounds and top-ranked performance. A U.S. Navy veteran who earned the Navy Achievement Medal aboard the USS Ainsworth, Baxter holds an MBA from The College of William and Mary, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University, and an APICS Certified Supply Chain Professional certification. He now leads ABAX, LLC, an end-to-end supply chain consulting practice.

Operational Transformation & Integration Experience

Across his career, Baxter has specialized in transforming complex operations and integrating businesses at scale. At PepsiCo he led the integration of the company’s two largest bottling operations along with the Quaker, Tropicana, and Gatorade supply chain planning teams, unifying planning and fulfillment across multiple ERP platforms and building a centralized professional planning organization from a fragmented structure. He improved operating cash flow by reducing a $1 billion year-end inventory position by 20% over three years, lifted in-stock performance by 15% to generate $110 million in incremental revenue, and delivered $20 million in annual productivity as a key architect of the PBNA divisional structure. As a plant and business-unit leader, he repeatedly turned around underperforming sites — earning Most Improved Plant of the Year honors — and drove multimillion-dollar savings through network optimization, vertical integration, and facility consolidation. Since founding ABAX, LLC in 2024, he has brought that end-to-end expertise to emerging consumer brands, building procurement, demand-planning, co-packer, and logistics capabilities for growth-stage companies such as 5th Season Fruit.