By thirty-one, Lena Brattström ran Mathjälp Sverige, one of Scandinavia’s largest food-redistribution networks, coordinating more than 4,000 tons of surplus food each year across forty-two municipalities. Working inside distribution centers during surplus events, she saw firsthand how rigid forecasts and procurement rules turned perfectly good product into surplus, spoilage, and lost meals — a pattern that helps explain why so much food is wasted every year.
In 2019 she left the nonprofit world to tackle the upstream causes: she founded Verda Chain in Gothenburg, a supply chain forecasting company that aims at food supply chain waste reduction by giving manufacturers more accurate, daily-updated demand signals. Verda Chain aggregates weather, mobility, point-of-sale velocity and other inputs to improve production planning; today it serves roughly 140 food and beverage manufacturers across Europe and reports €38 million in annual recurring revenue, helping clients reduce food waste and better match supply to real-time demand.
Brattström grew up in Umeå in northern Sweden, the daughter of a logistics manager and a high‑school math teacher, and studied economics and data systems at Lindqvist University in Stockholm, graduating in 2010. That combination — logistics at home and analytics in school — shaped how she sees production and supply problems.
She joined Mathjälp Sverige straight out of university and spent a decade building relationships with procurement managers at major food producers and standing inside distribution centers during surplus events. Those on-the-ground examples convinced her the issue wasn’t only storage or transport: producers were systematically overproducing because forecasts didn’t reflect real‑time retail sell‑through, promotions, or seasonal shifts — a gap that turned perfectly good produce into wasted product and missed meals for people in need.
Verda Chain targets a clear, costly problem in food production: manufacturers routinely overproduce because traditional demand forecasts lean on historical averages and ignore real‑time drivers like weather, promotion timing, regional distribution lag, and downstream retail behavior. That mismatch feeds food loss and write‑offs across the supply chain, shortening shelf life for many products and driving unnecessary waste.
The platform brings together fourteen data inputs — from weather and consumer mobility to point‑of‑sale velocity — and turns them into rolling, 90‑day demand signals that update daily. Weather explains shifts in produce demand; POS velocity reveals sell‑through and promotion effects; mobility data flags regional foot‑traffic changes. In a 2019 pilot with three mid‑sized food producers, those more nuanced forecasts produced 17–31% reductions in measured food waste over six months, a before/after change that altered production runs and order quantities. Presented at a logistics conference in Amsterdam, the results spurred rapid inbound interest and helped Verda Chain sign its first commercial customers in early 2020, even as broader supply chain disruptions exposed the limits of legacy forecasting systems.
By 2022 Verda Chain had grown into a team of 88 people split between Gothenburg and a product office in Berlin, and closed a €22 million Series B led by Nordskov Growth Capital — a funding milestone that expanded its engineering capacity and data integrations across European supply chains.
The following year a partnership with a major European grocery cooperative embedded Verda Chain’s forecasts into the planning cycles of more than 2,000 supplier relationships, bringing its data-driven demand signals closer to retailers and producers and multiplying the platform’s ability to reduce overproduction. For management and product teams, the deal meant faster onboarding of customers, broader access to point-of-sale data, and a clearer path to scaling sustainability outcomes across the food value chain.
Brattström runs Verda Chain around a simple management principle she calls “problem ownership”: if you spot an issue, bring a proposed solution — even if it’s only partial. That expectation has reshaped how teams tackle production and supply challenges, swapping a reporting culture for one focused on fast experiments and practical fixes.
Her approach is methodological: form a hypothesis, run low‑cost tests, then scale what works. She is skeptical of strategy built on intuition alone and equally wary of data used to avoid hard decisions. “Numbers tell you what happened,” she told an audience at a conference; “they don’t tell you what to do. That’s still a judgment.”
Her hardest lesson: mission passion isn’t enough to sustain a company. “You have to care about the work of building the company too — the fundraising, the hiring, the systems,” she says, warning that loving only the mission can make the company feel like a cage. That realism underpins Verda Chain’s push to use data and better practices to reduce food loss at scale and help reduce wasted food across the supply chain today.
Lena Brattström left a career spent helping people survive a broken food system and now spends her days trying to change the systems that create the problem — aligning producers, retailers, and data so fewer products are wasted every year.
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