Jim Giangrande, CFP® is Managing Director and a Founding Partner at Altium Wealth Management, LLC. With over 30 years of experience in financial services, he has spent his career helping his clients identify and execute their plans to achieve their life’s purpose. With Altium Wealth Management, he works closely with founders of companies and has spent the last several years specializing with founders in the food and beverage space, frequently attending conferences that support the industry. In 2020, he formed a monthly discussion group for food and beverage founders to provide a forum in which they can learn and grow from each other and from successful founders in the industry. Jim is an avid golfer and runner and a passionate alum of the University of Maryland at College Park where he recently finished his term on the board of Governors of the University of Maryland Alumni Association and now serves as an advisor to the board.

Randy Harrison is a Certified Public Accountant and a partner in Marcum LLP’s Tax & Business Services group where he serves as the New England Regional Food & Beverage Industry Group Leader. Prior to his career at Marcum, Mr. Harrison was a partner in Meyers Harrison & Pia LLC. Mr. Harrison has more than 30 years of diverse tax, financial, and business consulting experience. He assists small to medium-sized food and beverage businesses (as well as other industries) with managing all aspects of their operations, including growth, succession, cash flow, information technology, and taxation matters. He also focuses his practice on high net worth individual income taxation.

Randy earned his undergraduate degree from Emory University. He is currently based in New Haven, CT and serves as an officer of The Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven. He lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut with his wife, Bonnie, and his three sons.

Gary has been an advisor to many emerging growth firms in Connecticut over the past ten years. He is a “growth guy” and enjoys working with young companies on strategy, marketing, digital and business development efforts. He has helped CT based companies raise over $ 70 million in new debt and equity capital and worked hard to raise the visibility of the CT entrepreneurial ecosystem. Gary also works with the CT Center for Advanced Technology and leads the statewide CT Supplier Connection program that links small and diverse firms with large procurement buyers. As a consultant, he leads PCF Consulting Group and focuses on helping many retail and B2B clients with omni-channel and marketing strategy efforts and raising third party funds. Prior to starting PCF Consulting in 2004, Gary served as an executive at various firms including Prudential Financial, NatWest Banks, Aon, Daffy’s and AT&T.

Caren has been a marketing and promotions expert for over 30 years, having started her career at General Foods prior to turning to the agency side. She has led several agencies, including Clarion Marketing and Fresh Perspectives, and has worked with a large number of established brands. Over the past several years, GNF Marketing has specialized in helping young beverage and spirits brands and other simple ingredient consumer brands launch and expand. GNF focuses on assessing the marketing challenges for a brand, applying their deep talent and creativity, to uncover innovative solutions that meet the client need. GNF is a full service, fully integrated agency that can help with branding, promotion, digital and distribution issues and programs.

Senior Executive and Consumer Products Goods Leader with extensive experience in the beverage space at Nestle Waters, Perrier Group of Canada and as Chief Revenue Officer for ReadyFresh, Patrick is a skilled, pro-active advisor able to participate in all aspects of business development and management including operations, finance, sales, marketing, and human resources. Experience with all Retail channels, international markets, business transformation, e-Commerce, value creation, margin management, M&A, B2B and B2C.

Brian co-founded Fairfield Partners in June 2008 after spending 20 years in the software and technology space as SVP of Sales and a GM for Transcentive, the leading provider of performance-based compensation solutions. He has also been an executive with Hyperion in the sales area, where he had domestic and international responsibilities. He has worked with many growth firms helping to envision and staff their leadership teams and has focused on food & beverage as a major area for Fairfield Partners.

Ben is a Vice President of Boulder Food Group (BFG) and is a food & beverage guru. He currently represents BFG on the Boards at MALK, Quinn Snacks and OHi Food Company. His background includes stints in investment areas at The Yucaipa Companies, Hutchin Hill Capital and Oak Hill Advisors. He began his career in investment banking at UBS focusing on mergers and acquisitions. He is involved with the Naturally Boulder initiative in Colorado and is an active, competitive triathlete.

Tom has led sales teams throughout most of his career, specializing in developing relationships and building strategies with retailers. Driving market share in growing businesses and preserving profit margins before brand maturation were key aspects of Tom’s business acumen. Highlights were taking a 3rd place unprofitable brand (Arrowhead) into a number 1 share and profitable brand in 3 years. Also leading many channels into a number 1 position nationally and running a $1.2 billion dollar business. Channels of expertise are: C-Store / Supermarket / Pharmacy / Natural Foods

Chris is a 35-year veteran in the CPG industry working across food and beverage in both public and private equity environments. His experience includes General Management, Sales & Marketing, Strategy, Operations and Retail Execution. He recently retired as Executive Vice President of Sales & Operations at BlueTriton Brands after a 25-year career with Nestle in a broad array of leadership roles. Chris is deeply experienced in channel and customer strategy, integrated business planning, pricing and trade marketing with a focus on customer-centric value creation.

Bryan specializes in ideation and innovation process, front-end marketing research, branding, creating and developing new products and services, and innovation strategic planning. He is co-founder and “Chief Idea Guy” of the Growth Engine Company, a sixteen-year-old innovation agency based in Norwalk, Connecticut. Prior to cofounding Growth Engine, he was president of the Mattimore Group, a twenty-year-old ideation facilitation and creativity consulting company. Bryan is a well-known Fairfield County based expert on ideation and innovation. He has written a number of books on this important subject and has led over 100 successful innovation projects in a wide variety of food and beverage categories.

Dayton is Managing Partner of Boulder Food Group and currently represents the firm on the Boards of Barnana, Cauliower, Fourth and Heart and MALK Organics. Prior to his investment career, Dayton was CEO of Function Drinks, a venture-backed health and wellness company, which he co-founded and built from idea conception to $ 20 million in annual retail sales before it being acquired by Sunsweet. He has also served as an executive in Strategic Planning at The Walt Disney Company and was an analyst prior to that in investment banking, after starting his career as a management consultant with Bain & Co.

Lisa is a versatile market strategist and business development professional with significant experience working with early to mid-stage startups across multi-media packaging, SaaS model platforms and strategic business writing.  Part of her business writing involves re-positioning value propositions and creative messaging tactics for early stage launches, from a B2B/B2C standpoint.

Additionally, she brings a strong creative orientation with concepting and developing promotion-themed content marketing initiatives, as well as building strategic partnerships that raise visibility and revenues.

Industry specialties include the travel/hotel and niche lifestyle sectors.   She also serves on the board of the AMA/American Marketing Association’s Southern CT Region, as VP Memberships.

Mark has expertise in packaged goods consumer insights having worked at General Mills and Georgia Pacific in research roles. Mark led the consumer insights department at News America Marketing, a leading provider of consumer promotion and advertising services to consumer packaged goods and other national advertisers. His category experience includes foods and household products. Mark has worked with a wide range of research techniques including segmentation and market structure, concept and product testing, ad testing and controlled store testing. Mark also has extensive experience with both primary research and syndicated data sources (IRI, Nielsen, others). Mark holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and an SB from the University of Chicago in Statistics.

Cindy is an industry expert in paper and plastic packaging and works as a consultant to a number of growth firms and established brands on their packaging needs. She has been heavily involved in product development and concepts and works extensively with packaging and materials, as well as design across the consumer and food service channels.

Nancy has worked with major brands in the food industry for over 20 years. She has supported brands by developing processes to ensure product consistency across large chains, both domestically and globally. She specializes in helping emerging brands with formulation issues, ingredient selection and helping to engage manufacturers in meeting specifications.

Micki Tiffen has been working as an independent marketing consultant in her own firm, Out of The Box Consulting, where she has been providing strategic consulting supporting marketing and sales including shopper marketing, custom survey design/development and analysis/reporting for a wide range of clients and categories. She was responsible for assessing the effectiveness of marketing activities and developing pricing and retail strategy. She has also supported and produced shopper/integrated trade marketing programs. Ms. Tiffen is skilled in secondary research, trend spotting, expert/in-depth interviews and competitive intelligence. Trained as an anthropologist, she approaches business issues from a unique perspective bringing a convergence of art and science to surround a topic from a 360-degree perspective. She has had past assignment with Neilsen/IRI, NPD, Henkel, Ingelheim – Boehringer and others.

As Chief Executive Officer of Votto Vines, Mike is responsible for the strategic direction of the family business that he co-founded in 2009. Votto Vines partners with highly acclaimed wineries around the world, develops proprietary wine brands and works with leading distributors and national retailers. Votto Vines is the first wine importing company ever to be named by Forbes as one of America’s Most Promising Companies and to earn a place on the Inc. 500 as one of the fastest growing companies in America. Prior to transitioning to a full-time role at Votto Vines, Mike spent more than ten years practicing commercial real estate and corporate law at two American Lawyer Top 100 law firms in New York City and Boston, and later served as Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of an asset management firm with greater than $25B in AUM.