A career spent on the demand side of soil, now joining a company working on the measurement side.

The appointment

We are pleased to announce that Andreas Jacobs has joined the Soilytix Board as Chairman.

He arrives at a point where the company is changing shape. Soilytix measures soil as a whole system, across landscape, physics, chemistry and biology, and turns that into evidence that seed companies, research institutions and agricultural businesses can decide on. Over the past year, the work has widened from measurement into discovery: using field evidence and environmental genomics to search soil for biology worth developing. That shift needs a board that understands both science and supply chains.

Who is Andreas Jacobs

Andreas chaired the Board of INSEAD from 2015 to 2024. He chaired Barry Callebaut, the world's largest chocolate manufacturer, from 2005 to 2016, and was Executive Chairman of Jacobs Holding from 2004 to 2015. He serves on the boards of Louis Dreyfus Company Holdings and Dr. August Oetker KG, chairs Minibar AG and the Dr. Wolff Group, and co-founded the investment firm GENUI. He is the fourth generation of a family whose name Europe has known on a coffee jar for more than a century.

A career spent on top of soil

Read that list slowly and one thing runs through all of it. Cocoa. Coffee. Agricultural commodities. Food. Businesses whose economics begin in the ground, and whose risks arrive from it. Every one of those supply chains carries the same exposure underneath, and until very recently none of them had a way to measure it.

That is the work we do. Which is why this appointment is not a governance story.

In his own words

"Much of my career has been in the soil: cocoa, coffee, food. We always knew the risk sat in the ground, but we had no way to measure it. Soilytix is making that measurable, and that changes which decisions companies can actually make."

Why this fits where Soilytix is

There is a second reason his experience fits. Chairing a business school for nine years is a different discipline from chairing a listed manufacturer. Institutions have long horizons, mixed stakeholders and no simple scoreboard, which is closer to the problem of a young science company than any quarterly cycle. Soilytix is at the point where research has to become a business without the science being bent to fit. Andreas has held both kinds of organisation together before.

A year of building the team

His appointment follows a year of building the team around that transition. Timothy Rajakumar joined as Chief Scientific Officer in January, bringing a background in biomarker discovery and diagnostics. Norman Gentsch joined as Head of Agronomy after sixteen years as a soil scientist at Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Welcome, Andreas.

About Soilytix

Soilytix is a soil intelligence company. We combine biological measurement, environmental genomics and computational modelling to make soil legible: what is in it, what is happening to it, and what that means for a decision. We work with seed companies, research institutions and agricultural businesses across Europe, and increasingly on land restoration projects beyond it.

About Andreas Jacobs

Born in Bremen in 1963, he studied law in Freiburg, Munich and Montpellier. He holds a doctorate in law and an MBA from INSEAD. He was Chairman of the Board of INSEAD from 2015 to 2024, Chairman of Barry Callebaut from 2005 to 2016, and Executive Chairman of Jacobs Holding from 2004 to 2015. He currently serves as Chairman of Minibar AG and the Dr. Wolff Group, President of Niantic Holding GmbH, and as a board member of Louis Dreyfus Company Holdings and Dr. August Oetker KG. [1][2]

Sources

1. Andreas Jacobs, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Jacobs
2. INSEAD names Andreas Jacobs as Chairman of the Board of Directors. https://www.insead.edu/news/insead-names-mr-andreas-jacobs-new-chairman-board-directors

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