Austin, Texas-based Pod Foods has hired three new executives to its leadership team.
Leading the new additions is Peter Gialantzis who previously led the growth team at KeHE. Timothy Wee and Ankit Patel also join the leadership team with relevant industry experience coming from companies like Amazon and Boxed.
As Pod Foods expands its national presence, the team has grown from 33 employees in December 2020, to more than 70 employees. The new hires are bringing grocery industry and technology experience to Pod Foods, promoting innovation on the company’s vision.
Gialantzis is the newest member of the Pod Foods team and joins as its VP of business development. He previously served six years at KeHE Distributors where he helped grow the fresh, exclusive brands and e-commerce businesses.
“I got into this business more than 20 years ago because food is the great common denominator of humanity, the one industry that can enrich everyone’s quality of life every single day. Since then I’ve dedicated my career to breaking down barriers between great food and people whose lives it touches,” Gialantzis said.
“This industry is always evolving, and we’ve reached a post-COVID inflection point where the lines between traditional ‘channels’ and ‘categories’ are permanently blurred, which is a good thing. When I looked into the future of who was best positioned to connect these new paths between producer to consumer, it looked a whole lot like what Pod Foods is building. That is right where I need to be.”
Gialantzis also brings experience as a founding member of Boulder-based Lucky’s Market, helping to execute a majority sale by Kroger. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Whole Foods, specializing in category management, manufacturing, distribution and merchandising.
Wee will lead the engineering team at Pod Foods as CTO. He is also one of the company’s early investors. Before Pod Foods, he led and worked on machine learning teams in multiple Silicon Valley tech giants including Google, Amazon and Walmart Labs. His experience in scaling marketplace platforms and building technical infrastructure will be instrumental to Pod Foods’ growth and competitive advantage.
Patel has joined Pod Foods as the company’s COO. Previously, he led vendor management teams across merchandising, marketing and supply chain in Boxed, an online wholesale retailer. He brings to Pod Foods his expertise and experience in CPG, wholesale commerce and scaling supply chain to support the company’s growth.
To learn more about Pod Foods, visit podfoods.co.
