Trish Thomas & Nichole Wilson: Every Body Eat

Trish Thomas, a serial entrepreneur and 4x founder, is the Co-Founder and Chief Eating Officer of Whole & Free Foods. An early innovator, Trish founded and sold her first company four years after graduating from college. In the ‘90s, she built the first safe online community and a decade later had scaled transmedia entertainment properties to 100 countries in 65 languages. Trish has consulted on digital strategies for IBM, Dreamworks, Hasbro, Redbox, and Nissan to name a few. Trish pioneered a collegiate curriculm on how to improve the psychological resilience of founders as a means of improving start-up success rates. Currently, she is faculty teaching her entrepreneurship model at Northwestern University, and was the former Director of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Lake Forest College. A food-loving, vibrant, connector of people, Trish is mom to six boys and is extraordinarily grateful when someone else makes dinner – especially if every body can eat it! Nichole Wilson, is the Co-Founder and President of Whole & Free Foods. Nichole knows how to build, scale, and manage triple bottom line teams. Previously, she lead the R&D strategic planning process for PepsiCo’s $33B food portfolio, crafted Frito-Lay’s first Environmental Sustainability Strategy, pioneered alliances between M&A and R&D to create platforms to invest in smaller companies, like Sabra and Spitz, and managed the top tier brands Doritos and Fritos. She began her career in investment banking, and most recently led the $40MM investment portfolio for Chicago Beyond. A mother of two, Nichole’s family has experience with dietary restrictions that she believes should not define them. Determined and unafraid of what others call “impossible,” she uses her super powers to find unexpected solutions to big problems worth solving. Every Body Eat® isn’t just a snack company, it’s a promise to create a world where everybody feels included.