Learn from Star Chefs at Future of Food

Andrew Ballard is Executive Chef of Unilever Food Solutions Australasia and a presenter who has been working in the Food and Wine Industry for over 17 years. From a young age Andrew showed a passion for cooking working in several part time roles in restaurants and catering, before undertaking a course at Le Cordon Bleu Australia. Andrew has judged at many Sydney Royal Fine Food Shows, which represent the pinnacle of Australian products.

Andrew’s love of cooking led him to work at multiple food shows around Australia including the Sydney Royal Easter Show in the ‘Australian Women’s Weekly Theatre Kitchen’, where his role as a presenter for a variety of food brands and Emcee has highlighted his love of fresh simple food, wine and Australian produce.

Renyi Ching and his team are no strangers to the F&B scene. As a co-founder of myBurgerLab, the name probably needs no introduction, from a single outlet back in 2012, it has now expanded to six outlets to date. Over recent times, Renyi and his team has moved beyond burgers into the bubble tea and pizza scene under the same "lab" moniker.

Ngui Yeang Hong or fondly known as Ahong, is the chef and founder of the humble eatery, Grub by Ahong & Friends which opened since the last quarter of 2017. Graduated with a degree in architectural, he was also on MasterChef Malaysia and placed runner-up in the competition. The self-taught chef now whips up Western meals with an Asian influence at his restaurant in Seksyen 17.

Sean Ooi, the co-founder of Stranger at 47 who majored in Culinary took his childhood dream to run a F&B business into a reality back in 2014. He focuses on managing the back of house while he’s co-partner, Sing Yi makes sure everything runs smoothly out at the front. Strangers at 47 focuses on a single-minded menu that specialises in making crêpes - both savoury and sweet.

Audra Pakalnyte is Head of Strategic Initiatives at Fave Group one of South East Asia’s fastest growing digital merchant platform.  She has joined Fave Group as the first employee and has built a people-oriented organization with the team of 350 in three countries over the past four years. She has been wearing multiple hats of Product management, People development and operations, Public Relations and recently been appointed as Head of Strategic Initiatives to further support organization’s growth from a start-up to a scale-up building the next generation digital merchant platform. 

She is passionate about people development and technology. Over the past 10 years, she has worked in international corporations, start-ups, and non-governmental organizations in Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia.

Shaun is the Head of Merchant for GrabFood Malaysia, currently responsible for heading the country sales and account management team to identify, build relationships & partnerships with F&B merchants and manage their performance and contribution to building the GrabFood merchant network. Shaun’s Merchant team is involved in budgeting, planning and executing programs to educate and promote F&B merchant partners to fill supply gaps.

Brian is a Marketing Manager in Unilever Food Solutions and is currently part of the SEA digital transformation team. He started his Unilever career in Singapore, and did a 2-year stint in KL, before joining the SEA digital transformation team. Having previously worked on category strategy for Lipton, hotel/chains channel growth roadmaps, and omnichannel assets development for F&B e-commerce, he is now overlooking the entire SEA digital content ecosystem and working on Food Pulse, a F&B mobile app that will help improve the daily lives of chefs and business owners. Despite leaving Malaysia in end 2018, he still frequents KL regularly, a familiar place he calls home.

Chi Doan is the Ecommerce Lead, SEA of Unilever Food Solutions. She is a passionate Digital Marketer and Ecommerce commercialist with over 10-year experience across many industries including Food Service and FMCG. Experience in working thru horizontal & vertical organisations across Agency-Client as well as Country-Regional-Global roles based in SEA. With current role, Chi brings the vision of UFS as the category market leader to help Food Service Operators leverage technology of Digital, Ecommerce and Data to automate and optimise their process, free up more resources to focus on their core business at the same time recommend some new online business opportunities to grow.  Chi has lived in many countries in SEA including Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore and her home now is KL where she just relocated to 3 months ago.