©Phil Crow 2023

Nikos Manouselis is the founder and CEO of Agroknow, a food-safety intelligence company building data and analytics infrastructure for a safer, more transparent global food supply chain. His work sits at the intersection of data engineering, AI, and food & agriculture systems—turning fragmented public and private signals into actionable risk intelligence for industry, regulators, and international organisations.

An Electronics & Computer Engineer by training, Nikos holds two MSc degrees and a PhD in Agricultural Information Management. Since 2005, he has been working across industry, academia, and international institutions on a recurring challenge: how complex, heterogeneous food and agriculture data can be made discoverable, interoperable, and operational at scale—not just aligned in principle, but usable in real-world decision making.

Since founding Agroknow, Nikos has steered the company through growth, experimentation, and turbulence, helping position it as a pioneer in food and agriculture data collection, organisation, and discovery. A landmark milestone was Agroknow’s collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to redesign and deploy a new technological backbone for AGRIS, one of the world’s oldest and most respected agricultural information services. In 2017, Agroknow delivered a big-data-powered, fully re-engineered version of AGRIS—modernising its technology stack, content pipelines, and editorial workflows, while preserving its global mission and legacy dating back to 1975.

In parallel, Nikos was instrumental in the creation of FOODAKAI, a SaaS platform focused on global food-safety analytics. After building a product MVP and validating it with regional clients, FOODAKAI became Agroknow’s flagship commercial platform.

Today, FOODAKAI is a global leader in AI-powered food-safety risk intelligence. For more than a decade, the platform has helped organisations such as The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Unilever, and others stay ahead of emerging food-safety risks by combining large-scale incident data, AI models, and deep domain expertise into operational decision support.

Before entrepreneurship, Nikos pursued a research and teaching career, holding positions at the University of Alcalá, the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), and the Technical University of Crete. His academic work spans metadata, interoperability, knowledge-organisation systems, and data-integration architectures, resulting in more than 170 scientific publications and over 5,700 citations, according to Google Scholar. He has also served as President-Elect of the Ariadne Foundation, an international network focused on open-source technologies for knowledge organisation, management, and discovery.

Alongside his professional work, Nikos is actively engaged in entrepreneurial communities. He is a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) – Greek Chapter and has served on its board, with one of his roles being Chair of the EO Accelerator Program Greece, which supports founders as they scale their companies to their first million in revenue.

Outside his core work on data, food systems, entrepreneurship, and applied AI, Nikos maintains a long-standing interest in music radio and digital culture. He produces independent rock, indie, soul, and jazz radio podcasts, exploring how digital channels and algorithmic discovery continue to reshape music curation and distribution. His radio shows and podcasts are published on Mixcloud.

This blog is where these worlds meet: food systems and data, technology and organisations, leadership and personal reflection—written not as finished answers, but as an ongoing inquiry.