Green Bioactives expands senior management team

Green Bioactives Limited (‘GBL’), a world-leader in the discovery, development and sustainable production of high-value natural products derived from plant cell cultures, has expanded its senior management team with two key appointments. Chris Meaney joins as Chief Business Officer (CBO) and Dr Andy Hall-Ponselé as Head of Operations. Additionally, Green Bioactives have engaged the services of John Stevenson of 58|Seasgad to lead its bio-production development under a consultancy agreement.

The appointments follow GBL’s successful £2.6 million seed financing round in December 2022. The company’s platform provides much improved and sustainable access to the huge, diverse, and valuable library of bioactives generated by the world’s plant population – natural products that are vital to the pharma, agriculture and food industries, but often difficult to produce sustainably or economically using traditional manufacturing approaches.

David McElroy, CEO of Green Bioactives, commented: "I’m extremely pleased with the strength and depth of the management team that we are assembling to capitalise on Green Bioactives’ recent successes. Our unique offering has already attracted significant interest from business partners, and Chris’ and Andy’s proven track records of performance and leadership in biotechnology start-ups will allow us to leverage this potential and achieve our goal of becoming the world’s leading supplier of safe, natural and sustainably-sourced plant-derived products.”

On engaging with John Stevenson, David commented: “I am thrilled to welcome John to the team at Green Bioactives. His engagement represents a significant milestone for the company as we begin to scale up production of our natural products derived from plant cell cultures. John has proven experience in scaling biotechnologies from the lab through to commercialisation and his operational expertise will be invaluable to Green Bioactives at this exciting time for everyone at the company.”

Chris Meaney

Chris brings over 18 years’ business development experience in healthcare, nutraceuticals and manufacturing to Green Bioactives. Chris spent 12 years at Cambridge Nutraceuticals from company formation through to business maturity in marketing and as Head of Business Development, and was heavily involved in the creation of many product formulations.

 Andy Hall-Ponselé, DPhil

Andy joins GBL as Head of Operations and brings significant biotechnology, commercial and operational expertise to the company. In 2015, Andy founded Biotangents Ltd based on his synthetic biology and DNA assembly expertise. Andy led the company in its first 18 months, secured funding and developed its business strategy before becoming Director of Operations, playing a key role in determining the company’s product development and commercialisation strategies and growing the company to 23 FTEs.

 John Stevenson

John has over 35 years engineering and biomanufacturing experience and has a proven track record of delivering complex projects across public, private and start-up companies. He has held Head of Engineering and Project Director roles at a number of companies including Suez Water Technologies & Solutions, William Grant & Sons and Celtic Renewables. As Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of Celtic Renewables, John led the scale up from lab concept through to industrial operations to deliver sustainable biorefinery solutions with a mission to displace fossil fuels.

For more information visit: www.green-bioactives.com