About
I grew up in Norway and came to Stanford, where I built an individually designed major in Bioengineering and Food Systems Design. The intersection of food, nutrition, medicine, and engineering is what I care about most, and it wasn't something any existing program covered.
Before Stanford I cooked. I trained at Le Benjamin and Restaurant Kontrast in Oslo, the latter a Michelin kitchen run as a zero waste operation, where the question wasn't just what to put on a plate but what to do with everything that didn't make it there. I was named Norway's most promising young chef, won a national cooking competition, and hosted a show on Norway's national food channel. But the thing that stayed with me was watching perfectly good food get discarded because the system had no use for it.
I believe food is our first line of defense. Not a metaphor and not a wellness slogan. What we eat every day, over decades, does more to determine our health than almost anything a doctor can prescribe after the fact. Most of the chronic disease burden we treat downstream is built upstream, meal by meal. That conviction is why I moved from kitchens into research and then into building.
Now I'm working on Zuca, a company that turns fruit pulp the food system throws away into fiber people aren't getting enough of. It brings together everything I care about: nutrition that actually changes outcomes, a supply chain that wastes less, and food people want to eat. I'm always glad to talk with people working on similar problems.
Zuca
Fruit and vegetable producers leave behind enormous volumes of pulp. It's nutritionally dense and it's already been paid for, but almost all of it goes to low-value animal feed or straight to landfill. Many producers pay waste management companies to haul it away, so they're covering the cost of discarding something valuable and adding to the food waste problem at the same time.
Zuca closes that loop. We upcycle apple pulp into a fiber powder and build it into snacks people actually want to eat. The fiber comes from whole fruit, not isolated additives extracted in a lab, which means it arrives with the polyphenols and micronutrients that come packaged with it in nature.
The product is in development with a commercialization partner, we're building distribution through clinical channels, and we're raising a pre-seed round. If you work in food systems, nutrition science, CPG, or just happen to be interested, I'd love to hear from you!
Places
Countries I've spent time in, from a single city to several years.