Alex Worker

Alex Worker is a New Zealand food-technology entrepreneur and the founder of Future Food Aotearoa, a movement bringing together the country’s leading foodtech companies and founders to accelerate sustainable food innovation.

Born in Hong Kong to a New Zealand diplomatic family, his father Carl Worker served as New Zealand’s Ambassador to China and Consul-General in Hong Kong, Worker grew up between Asia and New Zealand. He studied international business at the University of Otago, completed first-class honours at the University of Auckland Business School and later earned an international MBA from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Worker spent more than a decade at Fonterra, working across sales, strategy and management in New Zealand, China and the Americas. That grounding in the dairy co-operative gave him deep insight into global food systems and a growing conviction that New Zealand’s food future would need to look quite different from its past.

In Beijing, he co-founded The Hatchery, China’s first culinary incubator, before returning to New Zealand to lead Impossible Foods’ local market entry as country manager. In 2020 he launched Future Food Aotearoa, a non-profit that has since taken New Zealand delegations to events like Future Food-Tech in San Francisco, positioning the country as a serious contributor to global food innovation.

Worker has also co-founded two ventures of his own: LILO Desserts, which turns orchard fruit waste into plant-based desserts now stocked in New World supermarkets and NewFish, which is scaling microalgae as a protein-rich future food source. He was named in the University of Auckland’s 40 Under 40 programme.

Worker’s profile is noteworthy because he is not simply building one company, he is building an ecosystem. His work connects New Zealand’s deep agricultural heritage with frontier food science, making the case that Aotearoa can lead in sustainable protein and food innovation, not just traditional farming.

Alex features in our look at what New Zealand food-tech learned the hard way.

Sources: University of Auckland · AGMARDT · Vegconomist