People now want more from their food and beverages. They are looking for better nutrition, cleaner choices, and products made with their needs in mind. Sheena Christensen built NEOTRIGEN around this shift in consumer demand. The company gives nutrition and health brands the consumer insights and data they need to create products that are appealing, delicious, and healthier.
Sheena’s passion for health began in her childhood. It has since grown into a mission to help companies offer food and beverages that support healthier, longer lives. A published author, she also advances this mission through her books: “Field -Tested Evidence for Bias- Proof Food Innovation,” “The Overlooked Cognitive Biases Undermining Every Stage of Food Product Development and How to Correct Them,” and “The Behavioural Grocery – Practical Steps to Convert Purchase Intent into Actual Sales.”
Foundation for Everything: Health and Well-being
Sheena is a nutrition and health specialist, with an MSc in Health and Nutrition from Copenhagen University. While working in food sales and tastings, she gained an understanding of how consumers actually behave and where the market is heading.
Health became Sheena’s focus long before it became her career. As a child, she dealt with frequent health problems. Because of that, she had to learn to manage her own health early in life. “I discovered that my own health had to play a pivotal part in my life,” she says.
She also realized that “health and well-being are the foundation for everything.” That led her to develop habits for protecting it. She began to pay steady attention to her body, her focus, and her ability to recover from hard stretches.
Being an Outsider Is an Advantage
Sheena has lived and worked in Denmark, England, Andorra, Spain, Eswatini, and Costa Rica, which has often made her the outsider looking in. She considers that an advantage. From the outside, she notices patterns and possibilities that insiders, embedded in their industry’s norms and conventions, tend to overlook. According to her, the magic often happens when insights from different areas are combined. That is when one finds the unexpected solutions.
“My cross-cultural experience and ability to see things from multiple angles have consistently helped me identify opportunities others miss,” Sheena says.
An Important Lesson Learned
When she was serving as head of customer success at a software company, Sheena pitched connecting their learning management customers globally for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing; one company with another. The director was skeptical, but customers, especially a networking firm, were thrilled. From this experience, Sheena learned to trust market validation over internal doubt. “Breakthrough ideas often come from listening to your gut feeling combined with customer feedback rather than following the playbook or hierarchical skepticism,” she says.
Three Pivots Before It Clicked
Finding the right business model took iteration. Sheena pivoted three times before it clicked. The breakthrough came when she stopped treating her passion as a thing to explore on its own; instead, she paired it with emerging technology and future-forward thinking. In addition to resonating with today’s realities, this approach positions her ahead of tomorrow’s AI-driven landscape.
“I remain actively observant, continuously reading market signals to anticipate solutions before they become obvious needs,” Sheena says.
About NEOTRIGEN
The company name NEOTRIGEN stands for a new generation of consumers as well as a new way of understanding them. “Neo” refers to the modern, emerging consumer consciousness. “Trigen” refers to the spark of authentic insight, and to three elements working together: perception, sentiment, and action.
NEOTRIGEN brings to light what matters most to consumers today and what will matter next. It helps brands create products that align with evolving needs, values, and aspirations. Sheena says that NEOTRIGEN is about bringing to light the genuine perceptions and sentiments of the new generation, the emerging consumer consciousness that will shape F&B’s future.
“It also positions my work as revealing what is newly important, newly valued, and newly possible when you truly listen to how consumers perceive and feel about the future of food,” she adds.
Purpose with Performance
Sheena integrates business strategy with social responsibility by attracting F&B leaders who see health and sustainability as core business drivers, not afterthoughts. These leaders want to create products that sustain health while staying connected to consumer needs and values. “This means rigorous listening, transparent practices, and the courage to prioritize long-term well-being over short-term convenience,” Sheena explains.
She also says that the competitive advantage comes from recognizing that responsible innovation, meaning developing products that are healthy and sustainable, is not a trade-off against profitability. In her view, it is the foundation for building trusted brands in an increasingly conscious marketplace.
Sheena expects the future to belong to those F&B leaders who can balance purpose with performance, guided by genuine consumer insight rather than assumptions.
The Future of Food
Sheena notes that the future of food is personalized nutrition and health-consciousness.
Customers are no longer satisfied just reading labels. They interrogate and scrutinize them. With smartphones, nutritional databases, and a growing distrust of generic health claims, the demand for transparency is growing at an unprecedented level.
“For F&B leaders, this isn’t a trend to weather,” Sheena says. “It’s a fundamental restructuring of the consumer-brand relationship.”
She is seeing that the old playbook of broad demographic targeting, macro-level health benefits, and one-size-fits-all formulations is becoming obsolete. The industry is entering an era where the individual is the market segment.
The shift from macro benefits to micro benefits represents a fundamental change in how food and beverage development is conceived, according to Sheena. The traditional approach was a label that read “High in Vitamin C. Supports immune health.” Sheena explains that the future approach is a beverage formulated for specific genetic markers, current microbiome, last night’s sleep, and the afternoon energy requirements based on circadian rhythm profile.
“This isn’t science fiction,” she adds. “AI-powered research and accessible biomarker testing are making personalized nutrition not just possible, but scalable.”
She wants F&B leaders to prepare for a world where consumers expect and demand products tailored to their unique biological architecture. The paradigm is shifting from lifespan to healthspan not just living longer, but living better, longer. This requires F&B companies to think beyond products and into lifestyle ecosystems.
Sheena expects the future beverage sector to be a dynamic nutrition delivery system responsive to individual needs in various contexts, not a static formula in a bottle or package.
The Leadership Style
Sheena establishes robust frameworks through attention to detail and clarity around priorities. Because of that, her team can operate autonomously rather than constantly seeking approval. As she is detailed-oriented, she is able to catch potential issues early and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
“I empower teams by providing context and guardrails, then trusting them to navigate the turbulence,” Sheena says. “Clients appreciate that we are both thorough and agile.”
Maintaining Work-Life Harmony
Sheena’s husband has been running his own business for more than 20 years. She credits marrying the right person with much of her work-life harmony. They both value independence and understand each other’s need for autonomy, and they are each other’s sounding board for major decisions. Because they both get it, there is little resentment over the time the work demands. “We are learning-oriented and highly adaptable to the challenges that come,” Sheena says.
The balance comes mainly from where each of them stands. He has years of business experience behind him, while she is starting out. Sheena’s husband understands the challenges she encounters in business and stays calm. “He has learned to manage himself around me while I’m still experiencing and shaping my business,” she says. “He has become my rock to lean against.”
Message for Aspiring Leaders
Sheena advises aspiring leaders to look for outliers. Their achievements show that there is no single formula for success. Leaders who learn from them become comfortable being different. Consensus may seem comfortable, but it is rarely groundbreaking in business. “Outliers make you question conventional wisdom, and they force you to question your own reality,” Sheena says.
The best opportunities often look wrong initially, she tells aspiring leaders, and being right often means standing alone at first. “I spend a lot of time being in my own company to not get influenced by conventional thinking,” she adds.
Inspiring the Next Generation
Sheena wants to broaden how people see reality. Her way of doing it is to listen closely, gather diverse insights, and build on them with others. The foundation, she believes, is staying perpetually inquisitive, asking better questions, and not just accepting answers. “Progress happens when we question what we think we know,” she says.
Sheena wants her legacy to be: “Question your reality.” “Challenge assumptions, test conventions, and stay curious about what everyone else accepts as given,” she says. “The best opportunities hide in the assumptions no one challenges.”
