Tina Owens is the Senior Director of Food & Agriculture Impact for Danone North America, the largest public benefit corporation and the largest Certified B Corporation in the world. Tina leads the charge for embedding regenerative agriculture practices, farmer resiliency, regenerative financing and industry collaboration. Tina is passionate about creating communally beneficial agricultural systems that incentivize farmers to convert to practices that increase soil organic matter.
In the past year Tina has worked on inking a multi-year ag funding agreement with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a collaboration which lead to the awarding of a $3M Conservation Innovation Grant from the NRCS for 2020-2022. This grant will enable farmer partners within Danone’s Soil Health Program to cover a myriad of costs in transitioning to regenerative agriculture practices, as well as track the impact to farmer profitability during the conversion.
Tina also spearheaded the Danone partnership with rePlant Capital, an impact investing fund, which is lending direct to farmers by providing low-cost loans to fuel conversions to regenerative and organic agriculture.
Prior to Danone, Tina spent 17 years at Kellogg Company, 10 of which were working on the natural and organic brand Kashi. Tina helped bring to life an industry-facing effort with QAI called the Certified Transitional protocol: a first of its kind certification that empowers consumers to incentivize farmer conversion to organic practices through their purchases. During her tenure at Kashi she instituted responsible sourcing programs related to honeybee health, cocoa, wheat and farmer profitability via incentivized organic conversion.
Tina resides with her family on 20 acres in Michigan, where they are transitioning previously farmed land to a food forest using regenerative practices.