Who We Are
Tim West
2015 IFTF Fellow
Food Entrepreneur
Founder, True West Ventures
Recognized as one of Zagat’s 30 under 30, Tim West is a Slow Food chef turned Social Entrepreneur. Tim founded True West Ventures, LLC as a consulting and experiential educational design agency specializing in facilitating conversations on the future of food, food systems, food hacking, food entrepreneurship and food culture. Tim is a Culinary Institute of America graduate and grandson of Arch West, the inventor of Doritos. He has cooked his way from the St. Regis Hotel in New York, to the Facebook headquarters in California, where he entered the world of food and technology entrepreneurship.
Tim co-create The Food Hackathon + Forum as a business plan competition and alternative educational experience to encourage entrepreneurs to work on more meaningful problems and to expose corporate teams to a more collaborative and inspiring working methodology.
In 2012, Tim won the StartupBus competition with custom cereal concept Cerealize; this experience helped him realize that he can feed more people with a cell phone and a computer than a chef knife and a flame.
Before arriving in California, Tim worked and studied Sustainable Food Systems and Social Food Movements at the University of Massachusetts. In 2009, he started the UMass Permaculture project and organized a team to write their Climate Action Plan to achieve carbon neutrality in food.