Rebecca Chesney

Senior Portfolio Lead, IDEO’s Circular Economy of Food CoLab Rebecca Chesney works with organizations to build a better food future. She leads IDEO’s Circular Economy of Food CoLab, which leverages collaboration to build a more regenerative food system—by design. Before joining IDEO in 2018, Rebecca was a Research Director with the Food Futures Lab at Institute for the Future (IFTF), where she led foresight consulting projects for companies such as Nestlé, Tetra Pak, Meat and Livestock Australia. She also worked with Syngenta to help them identify opportunities for both business growth and food system resilience. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired’s “Future of Food” issue, IBM’s thinkLeaders series, and Canadian Grocer, and she has been a featured speaker at conferences around the world. A researcher and teacher at heart, Rebecca has led ethnographic research and foresight training workshops with farmers, students, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders. Previously, Rebecca was a financial management policy analyst with The World Bank and a research assistant for the European Union’s FoodRisC Project at the University College in Dublin, Ireland. She was one of 10 accountancy graduates selected from across the United States for the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s 2007 postgraduate technical program; and that same year, she was chosen as Texas A&M University’s Earl Rudder Memorial Outstanding Student, among 11,000 graduates. Culturally curious, Rebecca has lived and worked across the globe, from China to Palestine to Lesotho. She holds degrees in accounting and finance from Texas A&M University and an MA in the Anthropology of Food from SOAS, University of London.