For eighteen years, Agroknow was more than the name of a company.
It was the place where we tested a conviction: that if we could collect, clean, connect, and interpret the enormous amount of fragmented information around food and agriculture, we could help people make better decisions—and perhaps prevent some problems before they became incidents.
We did not start with a complete answer. Far from it.
We built the answer gradually, through research projects, early products, difficult customer conversations, wrong assumptions, technical dead ends, and the persistence of a team that kept improving the work.
We learned how difficult it is to turn scattered information into something reliable, relevant, and useful. We also learned that data only creates value when it reaches the right person, in the right context, early enough to support a decision.
That idea became the foundation of Agroknow and, later, FOODAKAI.
But there comes a point in the development of a company when you have to question the framing that brought you this far.
For a long time, we believed that the main challenge was technological: finding more sources, improving the data, developing better models, and making risk intelligence easier to use.
All of this was necessary. It still is. But it was not the whole problem.
Food companies do not operate inside one clean digital environment. Their teams move between regulatory systems, authority announcements, supplier information, laboratory results, audit findings, internal platforms, spreadsheets, and emails.
A quality manager may have access to many sources of information and still struggle to develop a complete view of what deserves attention.
Adding another software platform does not automatically solve this. In fact, it may simply add another place to look.
The deeper challenge is connection: connecting food-safety risk with regulatory requirements, external signals with internal data, digital intelligence with testing and verification, and information with the people and processes that can act upon it.
This is the strategic logic behind our transition into SGS Food Nexus.
By bringing together what Agroknow and FOODAKAI have built with the regulatory-intelligence capabilities of SGS Digicomply and the wider reach and expertise of SGS, we have an opportunity to work on the problem at a different scale.
The ambition is not merely to combine two software products.
It is to create a more connected food-intelligence environment—one that can help companies understand risk, compliance, quality, suppliers, products, and markets with fewer artificial boundaries between them.
This is the logical evolution of the work.
It is also, for me, an uncomfortable one.
A founder knows intellectually that a company must eventually become larger than its original identity. But company names are not only names. They carry memories.
And Agroknow carries eighteen years of them.
- It carries the people who took a risk and joined us when there was very little certainty.
- The researchers and partners who trusted us with difficult problems.
- The customers who gave us the opportunity to prove that our ideas could work outside a research project.
- The mistakes we made.
- The moments when we almost ran out of money or energy.
- The moments when something finally worked.
It also carries a large part of my own professional identity.
So I do not experience this transition as a simple rebranding exercise, and I do not want to pretend that letting go of the name is emotionally neutral.
Still, letting go of a name does not mean letting go of the work.
The core of what we built remains: the data, the models, the people, the relationships, the experience, and the belief that better intelligence can help the food industry move from reacting to problems towards anticipating them.
What changes is the environment in which this work can now grow.
For our clients and partners, continuity is not a communication slogan. It is a practical responsibility.
The systems and services people rely on need to continue working while the teams, technologies, and data assets are brought closer together. The integration needs to be managed carefully, with respect for what already creates value.
The objective is not to ask customers to abandon familiar tools for the sake of a corporate narrative. It is to strengthen what works and gradually make it part of something broader.
I also know that integration on paper is easier than integration in practice.
Technology must connect. Data must be aligned. Teams must learn how to work together. Commercial models must become clear. Customers must understand what is changing and what is not. Different organisational cultures must find a common operating rhythm.
None of this happens because an acquisition has been completed or a new name has been selected.
It takes time. It requires patience, clarity, and many decisions that will be far less visible than the announcement itself.
Over the past year, though, I have also realised that this transition is not only about the company.
It has forced me to reconsider what growth means personally.
For most of my professional life, growth meant building.
Building the team. Building the technology. Building partnerships. Building revenue. Building new products. Building the next version of the company.
And whenever there was a gap, my instinct was usually to step into it.
That instinct helped create Agroknow. But I am beginning to understand that the same instinct cannot define every chapter that follows.
Perhaps the next kind of growth is not about building more.
Perhaps it is about becoming more selective about what deserves to be built, trusting other people to carry more of the system, and accepting that my value does not depend on being present in every important conversation or involved in every difficult decision.
This is not an easy change for a founder.
Letting go can feel like withdrawing care. Delegating can feel like avoiding responsibility. Protecting time can feel like contributing less.
But I am starting to see that these are not necessarily the same things.
There is also another part of life that I have too often treated as something to fit around the work: family, friendships, health, curiosity, travel, music, and the quiet time in which no business problem needs to be solved.
I do not want to describe these as tools that will make me a better CEO. That would still place the work at the centre of everything.
These things matter on their own.
An afternoon with the people I love is not unused capacity. A swim is not simply a way to improve executive performance. A journey does not need to produce a strategic insight to justify itself.
This may be the personal lesson inside the professional transition.
The first eighteen years taught me how to build something meaningful, how to persist when the path was unclear, and how much can be achieved when people with different backgrounds commit to solving a problem together.
The next chapter may be about learning how to steward what has been built.
To help it grow beyond its original form.
To accept that wider scale requires wider ownership.
To remain ambitious, but become more selective.
And to make more room for the people and experiences that make the ambition worthwhile.
That is a different kind of growth. And I have just started learning how to practise it.
