Jürgen Keil has spent 35 years in agrifood value chains, much of it as a senior executive at Cargill, scaling and running businesses from small operations up to global supply chains. These days he advises the founders, funds, and foundations building the future of food.

That crossover is why we've asked Jürgen to join FTW as a regular contributor. His monthly column, Jürgen on FoodTech Supply Chain, will cover the industrial realities of scaling FoodTech. To kick things off, we sat down to talk about what he's seen from both sides of the table.

You spent 35 years in agrifood, much of it as a senior exec at Cargill. What made you cross over to advising startups, foundations, and funds?

After three decades scaling and running businesses at Cargill, I wanted to spend the next chapter working with founders who are trying to genuinely improve the food system. Part of it is giving back. The other part is that I can offer them something they can't yet have themselves — the experience of industrially scaling and running large operations.

What struck me once I started was how structural the gap is. The startup ecosystem pours its energy into finance and technology, but it's almost completely undeveloped on supply chain and operations. Only a small percentage of founders, CEOs, VCs, and board members have real scaling experience. Essentially no accelerator builds supply chain expertise into its core program. And of the roughly 16,000 foodtech articles published last year, only around 3 percent touched supply chain, scaling, or operations. That gap is exactly where I can help most.

You've sat on both sides now — the incumbent's and the founder's. What does that vantage point let you understand about scaling a food business?

My whole career has been about scaling businesses, from small operations up to global value chains. That's the lens I bring. I can usually see whether a foodtech company will scale, and more importantly, where it's likely to break. And it tends to break in the same four places.

First, cost — founders underestimate what it takes to be cost-competitive, and the unit economics collapse at scale. Second, timing — they bring in supply chain expertise too late, after they've made decisions they can't reverse. Third, readiness — no secured raw materials, capacity, food-safety systems or real logistics model. And fourth, industry understanding — the wrong partners, the wrong entry points, the wrong timelines. That's why brilliant prototypes stall before they ever reach commercial scale. Every one of those is preventable if you deal with it early.

After a decade of shocks, is "supply chain resilience" a real strategy now? What does genuine supply chain resilience look like to you?

I'd actually steer away from the big, generic resilience narrative — that's a macro conversation, and a different one. For a foodtech startup, resilience is much more concrete: an end-to-end supply chain that works from day one rather than something you bolt on later. In practice that means designing for cost competitiveness from the start, securing your raw materials and capacity before you launch, building food-safety and regulatory systems that can actually scale, and genuinely understanding the value chain you're trying to disrupt. Then stress-testing all of it — materials, capacity, food safety, logistics, customer service — before you go commercial. If you haven't done that, you're not launching. You're gambling.

What's the supply chain problem everyone in agrifood is underestimating right now?

The industrialization bottleneck. Pilot lines work in isolation, slide decks work. But industrial supply chains very often don't, and the ecosystem around these founders isn't built to help them cross that gap. It's not a small problem, either: scaling and supply chain missteps have cost the sector billions over the last five years.

What's a widely held belief in foodtech right now that you think is wrong?

That if the technology works, the business will work. Foodtech doesn't struggle with science; it struggles with scaling. That's the part almost nobody writes about, partly because almost nobody writing about it has ever run a scaled agrifood production business. The other belief I'd happily retire is "we'll fix cost later." You won't. Cost competitiveness has to be designed in from day one, or it doesn't happen at all.

One piece of advice for a founder building in agrifood supply chain today?

Bring supply chain expertise in early; not as a firefighter you call once something's already burning, but as a co-architect of the business from the start. The founders who do that understand their full cost structure early, they go and build real industry knowledge by visiting factories and talking to operators, and they prepare their team for the cultural shift from a lab to a production environment. The ones who don't spend years unpicking decisions that made perfect sense at pilot scale and quietly kill them at commercial scale.

Before we wrap up, let's talk about the column. What's the throughline of what you'll be writing for FTW readers, and who should be reading it most closely?

The column is about one thing: foodtech's scaling problem. I'll write it from the operator's side — someone who has scaled and run these businesses, which is rarer in this conversation than it should be. So I'll get into why companies stall between pilot and commercial scale, the cultural and organizational shift founders have to make as they move from a small science-driven startup into a real industrial supply chain, the industrial truth behind cost competitiveness, how to build genuine end-to-end readiness, and how investors and accelerators can build supply chain and operations into their due diligence instead of leaving it out. 

Who should read it most closely? Founders and their teams making the jump from pilot to commercial, VCs who'd rather avoid preventable losses, and accelerators, who today offer basically zero structured supply chain support — and really anyone who wants to understand why foodtech keeps stalling, and what it would take to fix it.

For readers who want to reach you or trade ideas, what's the best way to get in touch?

LinkedIn for general professional conversations, and email for any founder who wants to talk through a specific scaling challenge directly.