Western New York IFT Annual Suppliers' Day
The Next Wave
Local Entrepreneurs Driving Innovation
Keynote Speaker
Maureen Ballatori
Maureen Ballatori (she/her) is the Founder and CEO of Agency 29, where she helps food, beverage, and agriculture brands discover their unique voice through smart, effective brand strategy. A frequent industry speaker and host of the Spilled Salt podcast, Maureen brings together innovators from across the food and agriculture landscape. She also serves on national and global boards, combining strategic thinking and creative problem-solving to help build brands and communities that drive lasting change.
Consumers today have more choices than ever, and that makes it harder for food and beverage brands to stand out. In this session, Maureen will share practical observations from working closely with food, beverage, and agriculture brands as they scale.
The keynote will explore how consumer expectations around trust, transparency, and sustainability influence purchasing decisions, and what that means for marketing and competitiveness in a crowded marketplace. Rather than focusing on theory, Maureen will highlight common patterns she sees across brands - what tends to resonate with consumers, where companies often overcomplicate their messaging, and how small strategic shifts can make a meaningful difference.
This session is intended to offer approachable, real-world perspective for product developers, suppliers, and industry leaders who want to better connect innovative products with the people they’re ultimately made for.
Meet Our Guest Speakers
Keynote Speaker
Pauly Guglielmo
Paul Guglielmo is an entrepreneur and food manufacturing executive best known as the owner of Craft Cannery, a contract manufacturing company specializing in sauces, condiments, and shelf-stable products. With a background rooted in hands-on operations, Paul has built Craft Cannery around a rare no-minimum manufacturing model, helping emerging and established brands alike bring products to market without the traditional barriers of scale. His work spans operations, food safety, product development, and strategic growth, with a focus on practical execution and sustainable business models within the food industry.
Beyond his professional work, Paul is deeply engaged in community leadership and service. He is an active member of Rotary, where he contributes to initiatives supporting youth development, education, and local nonprofits, including Sunshine Camp. Paul is also a podcast host and frequent speaker, sharing candid insights on entrepreneurship, failure, and building businesses inside real-world constraints. Whether in manufacturing or community service, he is driven by the belief that meaningful progress happens when people show up consistently and do the small things well.
Featured Panelist
Tracy Luckow, PhD
Tracy is the Co-founder and President of Whipnotic. In that role, she works to connect Whipnotic with consumers, anticipate future trends, manage the company's product development and daily operations and promote the brand. Prior to founding Whipnotic with her sister Lori, Tracy spent more than two decades working in the food industry for companies such as PepsiCo, Danone, and Sabra. She holds several advanced degrees including a Master’s degree in Food Science and a PhD in Sensory Science and Nutrition.
With a patented nozzle technology, Whipnotic creates whipped creams infused with all-natural fruit juices and flavor essences in flavors like Strawberry Swirl, Peach Mango, Brownie Batter, and Vanilla Salted Caramel. It's known for being keto-friendly, gluten-free, made with real cream, and free from artificial colors/flavors, offering a healthier, more exciting dessert experience for coffee, parfaits, or just eating straight from the can.
Featured Panelist
Matthew Pataki
Matthew Pataki is an aspiring voice for the future of dairy and a graduate research student in Cornell University’s Tako Lab, where he studies mineral metabolism and how dietary ingredients impact gut health. Driven by the idea of food as medicine, he founded Smooth Culture to transform milk—one of the world’s most accessible staples—into clean, thoughtfully formulated products that are enjoyable without added sugar, easier to digest for those with dairy sensitivities, and supportive of metabolic health through clinically studied probiotics.
Smooth Culture is a cultured dairy company working to position cultured milk as a daily dietary staple, beginning with delicious, accessible consumer products and extending toward the development of yogurt and cultured milk bases tailored for public school breakfast programs. Rooted in the belief that public schools serve as a critical dietary safety net for millions of children across the United States, the company is committed to improving school breakfast offerings through products that support metabolic and digestive health, while strengthening local production, manufacturing, and dairy farmers.
Meet Our Student Speakers
Our student speakers were awarded the opportunity to speak by winning the WNYIFT Poster Competition at Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Jacqueline Acquino
Developing a Texture-Tunable Functional Snack Ingredient from Mycelium Pellets
This project explores how pelletized Pleurotus ostreatus mycelium can be transformed into a crunchy, shelf-stable snack ingredient by leveraging its natural structure rather than heavily restructuring it. Mycelium pellets produced via submerged cultivation form porous, three-dimensional networks that can be infused with food ingredients prior to drying.
In this work, pellets were imbibed with selected ingredients and freeze-dried to examine how ingredient uptake and drying influence texture, structure, and appearance. The results demonstrate that intact mycelium pellets can be dried into lightweight, crunchy formats while retaining their original shape, and that ingredient imbibition provides a simple way to tune texture and appearance.
Texture analysis and SEM were used to
connect changes in structure with textural behavior, highlighting the potential of
mycelium pellets as a versatile food scaffold. Overall, this work positions pelletized mycelium as an ingredient platform with applications in better-for-you snacks, inclusions, and novel crunchy formats.
Fan Wu
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease characterized by epithelial barrier disruption, immune dysregulation,
and gut microbiota imbalance. To address the limitations of conventional therapies, we developed chromoplasts (CHR) isolated
from goji berry as a natural, biocompatible oral delivery system for carotenoids and systematically evaluated their preventive effects against UC. Pharmacokinetic analysis showed that CHR significantly prolonged intestinal residence, with mean residence time nearly doubled compared with free carotenoids, while maintaining comparable plasma exposure. In vitro, CHR markedly reduced ROS and enhanced antioxidant enzyme activities in H₂O₂-stressed
hepatocytes, while also suppressing proinflammatory cytokine production in LPS-stimulated macrophages. Oral administration of CHR in DSS-induced mice alleviated clinical symptoms, preserved colon architecture, mucus integrity, and tight junction proteins, and
reduced systemic cytokine levels.
Transcriptomic profiling together with functional inhibition assay identified suppression of PI3K/AKT signaling that mitigated inflammatory activation, and intestinal organoid assays demonstrated restoration of stem cell renewal through Wnt/β-catenin activation. In parallel, CHR reshaped the gut microbiota by decreasing Desulfovibrio and enriching Muribaculaceae, accompanied by recovery of major short-chain fatty acids (acetate, propionate, butyrate, valerate).
This work identifies plant-derived chromoplasts as bioactive structures with dual roles in enhancing carotenoid bioavailability and remodeling host-microbiota-metabolite networks, highlighting their potential as organelle-based platforms for functional food and intestinal therapy.