Elliot Begoun

Founder and Brand Champion at TIG Brands

Elliot Begoun is a 30-year industry veteran, author, podcast host, founder of TIG Brands, and a champion of Tardigrades. TIG Brands supports a community of entrepreneurs interested in building nimble, capital-efficient, resilient brands that become Tardigrades, not Unicorns. Learn more about TIG Brands’ programs here and catch Elliot at FoodBytes, the Hirshberg Entrepreneurship Institute, and the Natural Products Business School. Tune into the TIG Talks podcast and find Elliot’s articles in publications such as The Huffington Post, SmartBrief, and New Hope..

Don Buder

Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Don is a strategic legal advisor and corporate counsel to emerging growth and middle-market Food & Beverage, Food Tech, and Ag Tech innovators and investors. His clients are based in the major U.S. food hubs, including the Bay Area, Boulder, Brooklyn, Austin and Los Angeles. His law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT), has one of the largest food & beverage practices in the United States, with over 40 attorneys serving food venture entrepreneurs, emerging brands, larger food companies, and the private equity firms that invest in them, at every level of the food chain from “Farm to Label”. Don is a Founding Faculty Member and member of the Advisory Board of the Food Business School at the Culinary Institute of America (Napa Valley). He currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the board of Directors of KCETLink TV, the public television station in LA, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Technion Society – San Francisco Chapter.

Blair Kellison

Board Member & Advisor

Blair's passion is helping founders and their purpose driven companies reach their full potential through best practices and a culture of kindness.

Blair has spent 25 years in the natural products industry as a CEO and board member.

He was the CEO of Traditional Medicinals for 14 years during which he and his team catapulted an intensely mission driven company into the second largest bagged tea company in North America with distribution in 70,000 retail outlets.

Blair has been the first non-founder CEO of five organizations, each time partnering with the founder and leveraging his experiences to transition to an executive team, best practices run organization. He builds and then scales company cultures centered on kindness, purpose and passion.

He currently sits on the board of several purpose driven wellness companies including Sambazon Acai, Gimme Seaweed, Straus Family Creamery, and Urban Remedy.

Before entering the Health and Wellness industry, Blair spent nine years as a CPA at E&Y, received an MBA from Chicago Booth, and subsequently spent four years as a Brand Manager at Nestle, USA

Mike Scheu

Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Straus Family Creamery

Mike serves on the executive leadership team and is responsible for marketing, sales and product development at Straus Family Creamery, a family-run, mission driven organic food business based in Petaluma, CA. For over 20 years Mike has held a variety of leadership positions in the food industry, delivering measurable results in diverse environments ranging from early stage, high growth start-ups to the world’s largest food company. Prior to coming to Straus, Mike served in several brand management and sales leadership roles at Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream (a division of Nestle), Odwalla Juices, WetFeet.com and The Clorox Company. He earned his MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a BS from The College of William and Mary in Virginia. Early in his career, Mike worked in the financial services industry, with both Ernst & Young and JP Morgan. Mike joined the Board of FIG/Naturally North Bay in 2018 and became Board Chair in 2019. He also serves on the Board of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Mary Tarczynski

Principal, Client Solutions Lead at Parabolic

Mary Tarczynski has 30+ years of experience leading cross-functional teams to build equity and drive sales for CPG brands including Coca-Cola, Kraft, Clorox and Campbell’s. She left corporate marketing to spend four years in emerging ad tech; then in 2016 co-founded Parabolic, a shopper marketing agency offering “ideas with trajectory” – integrated strategies, concepts and activations – to help established and emerging natural brands sell in and sell through at retail. Current clients include Diamond Foods, Good Foods, the Plant-Based Foods Association, Straus Family Creamery, Traditional Medicinals, and Weleda Skin Care. Mary is currently the Education & Networking Events lead on the Naturally Bay Area Board. She is an advocate for diversity in leadership and recently “retired” after 13 years of volunteer leadership with the Network of Executive Women (now called NEXTUp) in Northern California. She and her husband live in the Oakland Hills and are the proud parents of Brown University and UCLA grads and a current UC Santa Cruz student. When not working, volunteering, or traveling for fun, Mary can be found running or hiking on Bay Area trails.