Bio&Me founder on life operating a food and drink start-up

Name​

Jon Walsh

Age​

52

Job title​

Chief executive

Education​

Durham University

What's your favourite food/drink?​

Granola with yoghurt on top, of course.

What inspired you to enter F&B?​

I was the launch brand manager of Sunny Delight. So, Bio&Me is my way of saying sorry about that.

Tell us about your role​

I think being the chief executive officer in a start-up is a mixture of being the chief decision maker and general dogsbody. Bio&Me has a really clear strategy: to be the very best for gut health. This helps make decision making easier, which is good, as I honestly have 100 decisions to make every day. Where there's a gap in the team, it’s my job to get stuck in and help fill it. So, that's what I do and I love it.

What does your typical day look life?​

I know this is a cliché, but there is no such thing as a typical day. I remember when I used to work at Nestlé I would come in and not only my day - but my week and my month - would be beautifully planned out with all these structured meetings.  What I love - but also what scares me - about start-up land is as I cycle to work, I have absolutely no idea what will crop up that day. Happily, most of the time it's brilliant, but you do get some shocks to the system from time to time. For example, the ‘great brown cardboard shortage’ in the middle of Covid. Where I just thought ‘we can’t let the business fail because we can't get brown cardboard’.

How did you get to where you are today?​

I've been very lucky in life. I had a great education and then worked at some brilliant companies where - if you're prepared to work hard - they gave you an excellent training in return. This includes P&G, Nestlé, John West and Meadow Foods. I actually met Dr Megan Rossi, Bio&Me’s co-founder, at Meadow Foods and saw how she was leading the thinking on gut health and that's what inspired the business.

When you’re having a bad day, what cheers you up?​

People cheer me up. Could be somebody on the team who's having a good day. My 11-year-old twin daughters also cheer me up as when I get home, they immerse me in their world and it's the best thing.

What’s your favourite part about the food sector?​

Food is one of life’s greatest pleasures. It’s something we care about and we all tend to have an opinion about it, whether it's about taste or sustainability or authenticity. That's what I love about the food industry. I worked on detergents for a while and you really can’t say the same about them.

If you could change one thing about the F&B sector what would it be?​

I hate food waste. It’s not easy, but I really think as an industry we can do a better job at eliminating it. As a business, we work with FareShare, the UK’s largest charity fighting hunger and food waste, and donated more than 20,000 products in 2022. However, there is much more to be done.

What’s next?​

Keep growing Bio&Me. We're all about making gut healthy food that’s authentic, tasty and accessible to all, and there's really no end to that mission.

In other news, Jonathan Petrides tells Food Manufacture more about allplants, the plant-based frozen ready meal producer​​.