Joe Lynam is a respected broadcaster and moderator who was the BBC’s senior Business Correspondent for a decade. He now presents the current affairs show ‘The Newsroom’ on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Joe has won many awards for his original journalism including the 2018 Headline Money Award for his BBC One exposé of how RBS (GRG) treated many of its own business customers. Joe was also the first to broadcast on Radio 4 a phone fraud (Vishing) in almost real time as an elderly lady unwittingly handed over her life savings to fraudsters. For that, he won the Wincott prize for Journalism in 2016.

Joe has travelled the world with the BBC covering the financial crisis (2007-2010), followed by the Eurozone crisis (2010-2013) and more recently the economic and political fallout from the Brexit referendum.

He has presented on the Today programme, Newsnight, BBC One Breakfast as well as Five Live and the BBC News Channel.

Joe took a mini career break to tackle the scourge of Disinformation. He learned the methods used by local and foreign ‘bad actors’ in spreading deliberately false information – known to some as ‘fake news’. He co-authored the Action Plan against Disinformation.

Gwen’s career is devoted to helping companies grow through meaningful customer engagement and activation across formats, platforms and experiences leading to purchase.

At The Store, Gwen is responsible for extending WPP’s leadership in the future of commerce and providing added value through client and industry initiatives. She supports global resources around emerging technologies ,particualry voice and visual search that are changing shopping rituals and blurring the lines between content and commerce.

Gwen is charged with identifying issues most important to retailers and brands around the world. Her team interprets trends, and consumer insights to a business audience in the form of conferences, webinars, playbooks and reports. This work builds on WPP’s collective knowledge of the new era of unified commerce where data drives brand content, product inspiration and future access to goods and services.

Gwen has led industry research for Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council which was subsequently published in HBR. She contributed to the book “Shopper Marketing” and writes for The Robin Report. Gwen serves on the editorial board of Journal of Brand Strategy, where she publishes regularly. She has written on retailing with purpose and engaging consumers with social responsibility initiatives. Gwen is a frequent speaker at NRF, Latam CongresShop, and numerous other international conferences including Retail Leader’s Forum. She is a guest lecturer at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and University of Arizona. She launched an iTunes U channel to share high level retail topics from industry leaders. Gwen serves on the Advisory Board of Fashion Group International and is an Endeavor Mentor.

Per Strömberg was appointed CEO of ICA Gruppen in 2012.

Per has an extensive experience in the food industry, both from the manufacturing and the retail side. From 2007-2012, he held the position as President and CEO of Lantmännen, a cooperative and Northern Europe’s leader in agriculture, food products, machinery, and bioenergy. Prior to this position, Per was the President and CEO of the food manufacturing company Sardus (later acquired by Atria Scandinavia), and he has also served as CEO of Kraft Foods Sweden, Kraft Foods Denmark, as well as had international positions in business development at Kraft Foods International.

Per is a board member of The Consumer Goods Forum, EuroCommerce, ICC and Byggmax AB. In addition to this he is also in the steering committee of the Swedish non-profit organization GEN-PEP that supports children’s and young people’s health.

About ICA Gruppen ICA Gruppen is a leading retail company with a focus on food and health. The Group includes ICA Sweden and Rimi Baltic, which mainly conduct grocery retail, Apotek Hjärtat, which conducts pharmacy operations, ICA Real Estate, which owns and manages properties, and ICA Banken, which offers financial services to the Swedish consumer retail market. ICA Sweden operates with independent retailers under the ICA idea.

Entrepreneur and AI expert Amer Mohammed has led Coop Sweden’s new Digitalisation unit since October 2019. His mission is to see through the enterprise’s digital transformation by building a platform which would allow Coop to offer the word’s best retail experience.

Amer has deep technical expertise combined with experience from both starting his own successful tech companies and having driven digital in large companies; most recently in Cap Gemini. He started his career at the age of 23 with Singelton Solutions in Switzerland, which was at that time the world’s first web-based distribution system for free newspapers. Later, he founded the award-winning health app – Healthy Heroes.

Amer believes that so far the food industry has only scratched the surface as per the opportunities offered by digitalisation and AI. One of his ambitions is to introduce elements of augmented reality inside the store, thus combining physical and digital, to offer customers a groundbreaking and unforgettable shopping experience.

A healthy environment, safe products and a socially just society: that is what Petra De Sutter is committed to every day. As a medical doctor, she has been confronted with the harmful effects of various substances on our health. Her indignation about this brought her into politics in 2014. Five years later, she represents the Flemish Greens in the European Parliament and is the first green Chairwoman of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Affairs. As such, De Sutter wants to put the interests of the consumer – ultimately, the citizen – at the heart of policy making, whether it regards the safety, equal quality or longer lifetime of products, the transparency of digital services or the trust in new technologies. In doing so, sustainability should always be the common denominator around which consumers’, (small) businesses’ and environmental interests are aligned.

As Director General of BEUC, Monique represents 45 independent national consumer associations in 32 European countries, acting as a strong consumer voice in Brussels, ensuring that consumer interests are given weight in the development of policies and raising the visibility and effectiveness of the consumer movement through lobbying EU institutions and media contacts.

As a consumer expert and advocate, and on behalf of BEUC, Monique is currently member of the EU High Level Forum for the Capital Market Union. She is an effective member of the Euro Retail Payments Board. She is also a member of the expert group on “trade agreements” (2018-2019) and Vice-Chair of the European Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations. She was a member to the expert group on “Online Disinformation” (2018).

In her capacity as BEUC Director General, Monique is currently EU co-chair of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) a network of EU and US consumer organisations, and she also represents BEUC at Consumers International, the international consumer organisation.

Apart from championing consumer’ rights, Monique’s passions/challenges are her family & cooking for friends.

Claire Bury is currently Deputy Director General in DG CONNECT with responsibility for regulatory aspects of the Digital Single Market. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.

She was previously Director of Modernisation of the Single Market in Directorate General Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs.

Before that, she was Head of Unit for Company Law, Corporate Governance and Financial Crime in Directorate General Internal Market and Services, and Deputy Head of Cabinet to Internal Market Commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Frits Bolkestein.

An English barrister by training, she worked in the Commission’s Legal Service and, before coming to Brussels, in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Elena Aldana is Director of International External Relations at Mercadona, where she has worked since 2013.

She was born in Madrid 38 years ago. She studied her BS in Economics in Madrid, where she got also her Master’s Degree in Marketing Management in ESIC Business School. At that time, she developed her career in Marketing working in companies such as Coca-Cola or BMW. Afterwards, she also got a Master’s Degree in International Trade that brought her to Brazil, where she worked at the Economic & Trade Office of the Spanish Embassy for almost 2 years as Economic Officer, within the program of internationalisation of the Ministry of Economy in Spain.

She joined Mercadona in 2013 where she has held several positions like Research Manager and European Affairs Manager. In 2016, she was promoted to the role of Director of European Affairs & External Relations in Portugal, where she is in charge of the European Affairs of the group, as well as the institutional relations & media in Portugal – where the company opened its first stores in July 2019. Also in 2019 she accomplished the Global Executive Master in Digital Business from ISDI, one of the major business schools specialised in digital business. There she had the opportunity to study about AI in Harvard (with a visit to the MIT Media Lab too), Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and Mobile Apps and Social Networks in Barcelona – at the time of the Mobile World Congress. She also attends the WebSummit in Lisbon every year. At the end of 2019, she was promoted to develop the External Relations of the company at an international level.

She has a passionate for new technologies and languages (she speaks 5 and she is currently studying its 6th one – Italian) whilst she combines this as a hobby with her current position, being also a representative of Mercadona in several Portuguese, Spanish and European associations like EuroCommerce, CIP, AEP, Associação Comercial do Porto, APED, CCILE, GS1, COTEC, etc.

Hans Carpels has been involved in retail management for more than 30 years, heading up and growing, via mergers as well as through organic growth, a national Belgian chain of electronics retailers.

In 1990 he became involved in the wider European sphere as a co-founder of an EEIG, umbrella company of national retailer groups, now englobing 36 countries from Portugal to Kazakhstan and Ireland to Oman, currently numbering 8.500 points of sale.

He has a successful entrepreneurial career in the retail sector as the CEO of a large national voluntary chain of retail outlets in consumer electronics and the President of an international retail group, position which he holds now for 10 years.

His long involvement, and later appointment as Vice President and President, provides him with a unique viewpoint of the retail sector within Europe, and beyond.

Per Strömberg was appointed CEO of ICA Gruppen in 2012.

Per has an extensive experience in the food industry, both from the manufacturing and the retail side. From 2007-2012, he held the position as President and CEO of Lantmännen, a cooperative and Northern Europe’s leader in agriculture, food products, machinery, and bioenergy. Prior to this position, Per was the President and CEO of the food manufacturing company Sardus (later acquired by Atria Scandinavia), and he has also served as CEO of Kraft Foods Sweden, Kraft Foods Denmark, as well as had international positions in business development at Kraft Foods International.

Per is a board member of The Consumer Goods Forum, EuroCommerce, ICC and Byggmax AB. In addition to this he is also in the steering committee of the Swedish non-profit organization GEN-PEP that supports children’s and young people’s health.

About ICA Gruppen ICA Gruppen is a leading retail company with a focus on food and health. The Group includes ICA Sweden and Rimi Baltic, which mainly conduct grocery retail, Apotek Hjärtat, which conducts pharmacy operations, ICA Real Estate, which owns and manages properties, and ICA Banken, which offers financial services to the Swedish consumer retail market. ICA Sweden operates with independent retailers under the ICA idea.

Mrs. Faenza has been leading the Sustainability and Values Innovation Department since 2015, directly responsible for Coop Italia’s policies in the areas of environmental and social sustainability, as well as the values behind the development of private label products, (safe, ethical, eco-friendly, tasty, transparent and value for money). Holding a degree in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Bologna, Chiara is also responsible for Coop Italia’s unique lab (chemical, sensory and molecular biology) that primarily deals with risk and innovation analysis for food and not food products, and is the main tool to fight food fraud. She started her journey in COOP Italia in 2002 and over the years she has had different responsibilities in the areas of PL and supplier quality inspection, R&D, product labelling, and PL pharmaceuticals.
In the period 1999-2002, Chiara worked as Quality Assurance and Site Quality Manager at The Lorenz Bahlsen Snack-World, where her responsibilities included the development of new products and the international audit of suppliers.

Julia Riss is heading the REWE Group Brussels Office for EU Public Affairs. Founded in 1927, the cooperatively organized REWE Group is one of the leading trade and tourism groups in Germany and Europe and employs over 360.000 people. Julia is currently responsible for managing and coordinating the Group’s communication activities with European political stakeholders.

Before starting this position at REWE Group, Julia worked for several years at a Brussels Public Affairs agency, advising a wide range of stakeholders on public affairs and integrated communication campaigns.

Following her studies in politics and law, Julia gathered initial work experience in a number of public institutions, from the regional parliament in the German state of Lower Saxony, the European Commission representation in Germany to the European Parliament in Brussels.

Julia is convinced that an important element to achieving a business’ sustainability goals are communication and cooperation across the supply chain. Political debates in Brussels form an integral part of that dialogue. A key component of REWE Group’s EU Public Affairs communication in the field of sustainability is the sharing of best practices and those elements that are contributors to success of sustainability projects.

Emmanuelle Maire works at the European Commission in Brussels, in the Directorate general for Environment (DG ENV). She heads the team responsible for Sustainable Production, Products and Consumption. The core activity of the team is to support the transition to a circular and green economy in the European Union.

Neil Jones is responsible for the governance, planning and reporting of all Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) topics at WBA (Walgreens Boots Alliance). WBA is present in more than 25 countries, employs more than 440,000 people and has more than 18,750 stores in 11 countries. His areas of responsibility cover the full range of WBA’s CSR agenda including community, environment, sustainability and workplace. Prior to this role he spent 13 years at Boots UK, the leading health and beauty retailer and part of WBA, in a variety of CSR and customer insight roles. He also has experience of sustainability and leading change projects at an SME public sector organisation in the UK. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at Nottingham University Business School (ICCSR – International Centre for CSR) and a Fellow of the Institute of Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability.