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Justin Massa      

Expert on Innovative Technologies, Big Data and Food; Former Partner at IDEO

Justin Massa currently serves on the board of the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

Massa was a director -> partner at IDEO (2015-2023). He led business development for IDEO's North American consulting business from 2021-2023 and sat on Helix, the firm's internal DE&I leadership team, from 2020-2023. His client work focused on venture design with an emphasis on strategy, the intersection of data science and design, and B2B products and services.

Massa co-led IDEO’s effort to explore what data science would mean for design thinking, a project that culminated in IDEO’s acquisition of a data science firm (Chicago-based Datascope Analytics) in 2017. After this acquisition, he co-led the integration of Datascope into the Chicago studio and the expansion of data science as a capability across IDEO. In its first full year, IDEO’s data science discipline exceeded its revenue targets by 30% and the discipline has nearly doubled in size with 100% employee retention for 3+ years.

Before coming to IDEO, Massa was the founder and CEO of Food Genius, a foodservice data and analytics startup that was acquired by USFoods in 2017, where it continues to operate it as an independent business unit. In 2019, Food Genius was responsible for driving more than $150MM in incremental sales for US Foods. Under Massa's leadership, Food Genius served nationally recognized restaurant chains, convenient store and grocery retailers, consumer packaged goods manufacturers and food distributors such as Dine Equity, Kraft, Unilever, Reinhart Foodservice, and Safeway. Food Genius received a 2012 Chicago Innovation "Up-and-Comer"​ Award and was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2013 list of 100 Brilliant Companies.

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