Archives: Speakers

Emma is Managing Director of Lucky Saint, the multi-award winning 0.5% superior unfiltered lager listed in +2500 bars/pubs and restaurants across the UK in bottle and on draught. Emma has worked in consumer goods for 20 years across Europe and Africa: in the blue chips of Tesco and Diageo, and grown fledgling brands into household names such as innocent and Graze. It is the gritty challenging world of scaling start-ups that Emma loves and the reason she joined founder of Lucky Saint Luke Boase as MD in February 2020. Emma has 2 young girls and is a passionate advocate of championing women in industry: as an Ambassador for Retail Week’s Be Inspired programme and Steering Group Member for The Grocery Girls.

With 25 years of experience at the forefront of Global sales, marketing, and business development for Beverage, Dairy, Bakery, Confectionery, Food Ingredients, Food Flavours, Food Service FMCG / Private Label, Retail, HIS (High Intensity Sweeteners) Next generation Natural Sweeteners, Natural Flavours. Using pioneering and exciting new technologies to produce sustainable F&B taste solutions Sweegen is your preferred partner to work with. 

Andrea Properzi is a chemist and works as a quality manager at the Fundación CANNA. Born in the Italian Alps, he moved to Padua (UNIPD) to continue his studies (Inorganic Chemistry). In 2013, Andrea moved to Barcelona and contributed to the development of systems that minimized health-related risks for both the operator and the consumer of biologically derived products. In the last years, in Barcelona, Andrea has helped to manage the projects/programs out of routine analytical practices.

John began his work in mass spectrometry over 25 years ago designing Time of Flight systems for the study of rapid combustion processes. From there he went on to work on the design of atmospheric pressure external ion source systems for quadrupole based analyzers. John gained experience of ion trap systems prior to moving onto triple quadrupole configurations and business applications. Throughout his career, John has held a number of positions, including research fellow, application chemist, development physicist, sales specialist and group manager. Having been with Agilent Technologies for over 10 years, he is currently responsible for gas phase and mass spectrometry within the International Distributor Organization. John holds a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a PhD in Physical Chemistry

David Curry has had a varied career that has taken him around the world. He has been involved in a number of tech businesses with his serial entrepreneur wife, working on everything from tech infrastructure to fund raising seed capital in a range of applications. Starting out as an Officer in the Canadian Navy he left that to pursue a career in Opera and Musical Theatre which as a principal has appeared in over 2000 performances in 27 countries. The world of Opera provided access at a very high level to a unique group of people which include business leaders and policy makers which has offered invaluable insight and perspective. Covid19 provided an impetus to merge and apply his unique talents to tell the story of the evolution of the burgeoning world of the global cannabis trade.

ick Pateras is Managing Director, Europe at Materia, where he oversees the company’s operations across Germany, Malta and the UK. Materia is an EU GMP certified manufacturer and distributor of medical cannabis and CBD products across the burgeoning European market. Previously, Nick served as Vice President, Strategy at Lift & Co., Canada’s leading cannabis education and insights platform. He is a regular speaker at cannabis conferences across North America and Europe and taught the Cannabis Business Fundamentals course at George Brown College in Toronto in 2018-19. Prior to his time in cannabis, Nick spent several years in the pharmaceutical sector with Johnson & Johnson Inc, managing various category-leading OTC and Health & Beauty businesses.