My Food Job Rocks!

Today’s guest is the Vice President of Business Development for a distributor/ supplier, SPI Group, Russ Nishikawa. What SPI Group does is brokers deals with lesser known ingredients and markets them to customers. A specialized ingredient producer will make deals with distributors for them to market or sell their product. For example, I would have never known about a pea protein from Belgium if it wasn’t for the SPI Group. You don’t hear much about these types of businesses in school, but they are all the rage in industry, especially if you deal with highly functional and trendy ingredients. Anyways, I’ve known Russ Nishikawa for a couple of years in Northern California. He reminds me of my uncle to be honest. About Russ Nishikawa Russ has been involed in the growth of SPI Group for 25 years. He is involved in new ingredient business development with key customers and targeted market segments, working with new ingredient from new and existing suppliers and determining how applicable the product benefits are t