Former Amazon exec joins Local Bounti as CEO

Former Freshly CEO and Amazon executive Anna Fabrega is joining greenhouse-vertical farm grower Local Bounti as CEO.

The company’s co-founders and co-CEOS, Craig Hurlbert and Travis Joyner, will take on new roles as senior vice president of strategy and chief technology officer, respectively, and keep their seats on Local Bounti’s board of directors.

Fabrega joins the company on June 5.

She brings more than two decades of operations, consumer goods, and food production experience —and a track record of leading and scaling businesses — to Local Bounti. At Freshly, a direct-to-consumer fresh prepared food subscription service, Fabrega succeeded the company’s founder as CEO. She led the rollout of new product lines to meet customer demand. Prior to Freshly, Fabrega spent nearly a decade at Amazon, most recently leading and scaling Amazon Go convenience stores and Amazon Kitchen, Amazon’s private label fresh prepared foods operation, to dozens of locations across the U.S.

Before joining Amazon Go’s founding team, Fabrega had leadership roles within Amazon, including overseeing the company’s Sports and Outdoors e-commerce business. She has also led large-scale initiatives at Microsoft and Stripes Convenience Stores.  Fabrega serves on the board of APEI, a for-profit higher education provider, and is on the board of trustees for the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta.

“We started Local Bounti with a vision to help solve global food shortages through a thoughtful and capital efficient approach that maximizes our unit-level economics through efficiencies driven by our Stack & Flow Technology,” Hurlbert said in a news release. “With Anna as our new CEO, we are poised to expand our reach as we execute on our growth strategy.”

“Her depth in the retail sector and direct experience scaling up operations is a perfect fit for our business,” Joyner said in the release. “Anna has a keen understanding of how to execute in this operation’s intensive and technologically complex environment, and we look forward to taking Local Bounti’s product offering to the next level.”

Fabrega said she grew up in agriculture and her father runs a small farm in Panama, and she supports local and sustainable foods.

“ILocal Bounti represents the most innovative and promising approach to getting customers fresh, high-quality, flavorful food from our farms to store shelves,” Fabrega said in the release. “Craig and Travis have created a best-in-class model for sustainable agriculture. I see a huge opportunity for Local Bounti to expand its customer base and enhance penetration by offering more products in more locations — and do so in a way that’s better for the planet.”

Hurlbert and Joyner founded Local Bounti in 2018. Local Bounti uses its patent pending Stack & Flow Technology to grow healthy food in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Local Bounti distributes food to more than 10,000 retail locations across 35 U.S. states and Canadian provinces with nationally recognized retailers. The company is growing, with the current expansion of its Georgia facility and additional facilities under construction in Texas and Washington. The company produces more than 25 stock keeping units (SKUs), with a focus on lettuce, packaged salad, and cress; and it plans to expand into more SKUs and geographies.