Partner | Managing Director – Ingredients And Commodities
–
A sourcing professional with a passion for problem solving. Dan is a self-pronounced “farm kid” who grew up in the agriculture community in Northern Michigan. His family owned and operated an innovative company that specialized in manufacturing and selling dried fruit ingredients to industrial and food service clients.
Most recently Dan was Senior Procurement Manager at fairlife, LLC, a subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company, where he was solely responsible for overseeing the strategic sourcing efforts associated with their entire Ingredient spend. He is most proud of his work around building a resilient and cost competitive supply base over the course of the pandemic, for a brand with a portfolio of products that saw its revenue grow 3X over that same period of time.
Dan began his career with Nestle S.A. in various strategic sourcing focused roles. He helped optimize their Gerber baby food brand’s fruit and vegetable farm to factory sourcing program. He was heavily involved in managing grower relations, transportation and 3rd party warehousing operations across a number of crops and growing regions. After five years, he moved into a newly created role supporting Nestle’s Beverage division and their health and wellness focused coffee creamer brand, Natural Bliss. Dan was the Procurement lead on the brand’s commercial team responsible for quickly executing cost-effective innovation and renovation projects that impacted ingredients, packaging and indirect categories of spend.
Dan possesses a BA in Business Management from Northwood University where he played college football while graduating in three years. He also has an MS in Supply Chain Management from Michigan State University.