Lara Hanlon is an award-winning design strategist, educator, facilitator, and keynote speaker. In 2022, Lara founded Portion Collaborative to help food businesses reimagine our food systems, including processes, technologies, and services. Before founding Portion Collaborative, she served as a Senior Designer at IBM in New York City where she worked across brand, software, and research, delivering market-differentiated outcomes for the enterprise. During her time at IBM, she was integral in the facilitation of design thinking engagements for clients in the food and retail sector including Unilever, Walmart, CocaCola, McDonald’s, CVS, and PepsiCo. This work underscored the need for more strategic, efficient and diverse thinking at the board level to help fix our broken food system. In parallel to her corporate career, Lara developed “éntomo” — a multi-award winning project that used design methodologies to encourage Western society to embrace insects as a sustainable food source. In 2017, she delivered a TEDx talk on her discoveries.