Q&A With Grow-NY Mentor Patricia Winand Springer

As the Grow-NY Food & Agriculture Summit approaches, anticipation is building for the announcement of this year’s finalists. Once selected, teams will spend the fall working alongside experienced mentors who provide industry expertise and regional insight, helping founders strengthen their businesses, build valuable regional connections, and prepare for the Grow-NY Food & Agriculture Summit. 

New mentor Patricia Winand Springer is a seasoned executive and entrepreneur with a career spanning over 30 years across telecommunications, food manufacturing, and global operations. She brings deep expertise in scaling businesses and turning around complex organizations. 

Patricia successfully founded and grew a Perfeito Foods that brought authentic Brazilian seasonings from concept to major retail shelves, including Wegmans, Safeway, Amazon, and Walmart. Her company’s success in product development and supply chain execution earned her the 2023 Cayuga County Small Business of the Year award. 

Before launching her own venture, she held senior leadership roles at global organizations such as National Grid, PerkinElmer, and Claro Brazil, managing budgets up to $30 million and leading teams of more than 300 people across 17 countries. She holds an MBA from MIT, where she was a Sloan Fellow.   

Fluent in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, she brings a global, cross-cultural perspective to mentoring founders. Today, she focuses on guiding emerging leaders through critical growth phases, helping them build resilient, scalable, and internationally competitive businesses. 

Read our Q&A with Patricia below to learn how her global leadership experience and hands-on operational expertise guide her mentorship of growing companies. 

Question: What is your experience in food and ag innovation?
My background combines 30 years of global operational leadership with boots-on-the-ground entrepreneurial experience. I founded and scaled Winand Products, a manufacturing firm in Auburn, NY, where I led the transition of our brand, Perfeito Foods, from concept to a multi-channel retail presence. A key highlight was collaborating with the Cornell Food Venture Center and NYSTAR to pioneer a first-to-market, shelf-stable seasoning using fresh garlic. This required a deep dive into product innovation, FDA compliance, and building a certified production facility from the ground up. This journey, layered over a career managing global P&Ls up to $30M, allows me to bridge the gap between high-level AgTech strategy and the granular challenges of food manufacturing.

Question: What do you think makes the Grow-NY region the ideal place for startups to put down roots?
The Grow-NY region offers a unique ecosystem of excellence. Having been based in Auburn, I’ve seen firsthand the incredible synergy between world-class research institutions like Cornell, a robust agricultural supply chain, and supportive partners like the Small Business Development Center and Technology Development Organization. There is a tangible infrastructure here, from the fields to the production facilities to major retailers like Wegmans—that allows a startup to validate, produce, and scale within a single region. For ag innovators specifically, the proximity to diverse agricultural landscapes provides a perfect real-world testing ground for new technologies.

Question: What should food and ag startups keep in mind as they grow?
Scalability requires a balance of hunter instinct and operational rigor. While the initial focus is often on the product or the spark of innovation, long-term success depends on mastering execution. Whether you are developing technology for the field or a product for the shelf, you must focus on the manufacturing process, the order-to-cash cycle, and supply chain optimization early on. Growth inherently brings complexity; applying Lean Six Sigma principles and building an operational roadmap that can handle 10x your current volume is what separates a fleeting startup from a sustainable business.

Question: What excites you about mentoring a Grow-NY finalist?
I am passionate about helping founders navigate the strategic architecture and the messy middle of scaling. After decades of leading global operations and launching my own venture in this region, I want to help finalists refine their go-to-market strategies and avoid the common pitfalls of rapid growth. Whether it’s refining a B2B commercial model for AgTech or optimizing a production facility for a food manufacturer, I love helping entrepreneurs turn their vision into a disciplined, high-margin organization. Seeing the next wave of innovation take root in our region is deeply rewarding. 

The 2026 Summit will take place November 12-13 in Rochester, NY and virtually.