Sustainable Egg Production Expert Group

Sarah Dean

Chair of Sustainable Egg Production Expert Group

Sarah Dean is the fourth-generation owner and Chair of Noble Foods, founded by her great-grandfather in 1920. She took over the leadership role in 2019 after the company returned to full family ownership.

Sarah works closely with the executive team, focusing on continuing the growth of Noble Foods while staying true to the company’s core values of sustainability, as well as animal welfare and innovation.

Dr Hongwei Xin

Dr Xin is the Dean of AgResearch and Director of the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station at The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. Prior to joining the UT Institute of Agriculture in April 2019, Dr Xin was assistant dean for research of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University, director of the Egg Industry Center located at ISU, and interim director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center.

Dr Xin’s scholarly programmes focus on air quality relative to animal production; animal-environment interactions with regards to animal bioenergetics, behaviour and welfare, production efficiency and sustainability; livestock and poultry production systems engineering; and precision livestock farming.

Prof Ilias Kyriazakis

Prof Ilias Kyriazakis is the Professor of Animal and Veterinary Science at the Institute for Global Food Security of Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a veterinarian by training who specialises in the effects of animal management on their performance, the ability to cope with challenges, such as pathogens, and their environmental impact.

His recent work in poultry addresses: 1) the effect of nutrition on the ability of birds to cope with pathogens, such as coccidia; 2) the use of alternative and home grown feeds in poultry systems and 3) the development of methods to assess the environmental impact of local and global poultry systems.

Dr Nathan Pelletier

Dr Nathan Pelletier is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He currently holds the NSERC/Egg Farmers of Canada Industrial Research Chair in Sustainability. Nathan’s research focuses on understanding and managing sustainability risks and opportunities in the egg industry.

He contributes to the development of methods for sustainability assessment, which he uses to model the implications of contemporary and alternative technologies and management regimes with respect to sustainability targets and thresholds. Specific domains of interest include climate change, energy use, reactive nitrogen, food security, social licence, and market access.

Paul Bredwell

Paul has over 28 years of experience in the poultry and egg industry, including his current role as Executive Vice President of Regulatory Programmes at the US Poultry and Egg Association. He is responsible for developing educational programmes to assist all facets of the poultry and egg industry, including tools that increase awareness of the environmental risks and adherence to environmental regulations.

Paul also holds a licence as a registered professional engineer in three US states after graduating with a Bachelor’s of Civil Engineering in 1986. In 2013, Paul launched a sustainability effort which led to the development of the ‘US Roundtable for Sustainable Poultry & Eggs’, a multistakeholder initiative which has seen the evolution of a sustainability benchmarking tool for the industry.

Vasco Masías Málaga

Vasco Masías is a food systems innovator and serial entrepreneur with more than 30 years’ experience building businesses addressing global food challenges. He founded Ovosur, Peru’s first egg products company, and is President of Grupo Alimenta and Chairman of La Calera, Peru’s largest egg producer.

Through LifeSoil (Vida al Suelo), he works to close the egg industry’s loop by transforming poultry by-products into regenerative fertilisers used by farmers across Peru. Vasco has also founded ventures spanning microalgae, nutrition, food additives and forestry. A Harvard Business School OPM Fellow, he champions Zero Hunger, the circular economy and regenerative agriculture.