Our mission
Quality teams in food have always carried more than their tools could hold. We're building what they've been missing.
The world we see coming
The work isn't going down. It's going up.
Customer requests, supplier questionnaires, requirement checks, audits, documentation. All increasing — in volume, in formats, in urgency.
Most of it is still handled through inboxes, scattered files, and a small number of people carrying too much of the load. Quality people sit in the middle of that reality. They're not just there to approve documents at the end — they connect product, sourcing, operations, customer requirements, supplier information, and regulatory expectations.
They're often the people who turn scattered standards and evidence into decisions the business can actually act on. When their work is too manual, the whole organisation gets slower, more reactive, and too dependent on a few individuals.
“We believe the future of quality work looks different. Repetitive work handled by software and AI. People focused on judgment, exceptions, review, and trust.”
The winning products won't just answer questions faster. They'll make the work more structured, more transparent, and easier to improve over time.
What we're becoming
The working layer for quality work in food.
We're not trying to become the system of record. We're not building a generic AI assistant for every use case. We're building the layer that helps quality teams get work done — using the systems, files, and data they already have.
Today, that starts with customer requests: questionnaires, technical data sheets, COA updates, portal submissions. The work that's most repetitive, most painful, and most ready for AI to earn its place.
But the inbox doesn't stop there. Comparing specifications. Red-lining a customer requirement document against last year's version. Pulling audit data. Checking certifications. Updating a V-label. Asking a supplier for missing information. All of it takes time. Almost none of it is why these people chose to work in food.
Quality stops being the bottleneck. It becomes a reliable operating function for the business.
If we get this right, Passionfruit won't just help teams respond faster. It will help quality people operate with more leverage. Their expertise gets spent on the work that actually needs it — not on copy-pasting the same answer into the 40th questionnaire this month.
How we build
One workflow at a time, alongside food suppliers.
We don't believe in software designed in isolation from the people who'll use it. So we build differently: we sit with quality teams, understand how the work actually happens today, and improve it one workflow at a time. As we learn, we turn what works into reusable patterns the rest of the industry can use.
We start with customer requests because they're concrete, recurring, and painful enough to create a real learning loop. The same approach extends to everything else that lands on a quality team — requirement reviews, audits, supplier follow-ups, the work that doesn't yet have a tool of its own.
This is how we stay close to reality without losing focus: start specific, learn deeply, productise the pattern, repeat.
What we believe
Three things that won't change.
01
Quality is not a support function.
It's the reputation of the company.
Safety and taste are the top two reasons people buy food — ahead of price, ahead of brand. The team responsible for those outcomes deserves tools that match what they actually do.
02
Food is not just product and price.
It's trust.
The suppliers winning today aren't just winning deals — they're winning customers. And they keep them by being the easiest to work with. Trust is built in the day-to-day operational moments. We're the tool that helps build it.
03
AI should give people back their expertise. Not replace them.
The quality professional who spent years mastering food safety should spend her time on food safety — not on copy-pasting the same answer into the 40th questionnaire this month. We build for review, judgment and trust. Not autonomy.
Founders
Started by two people
who saw it from both sides.
Maikel Fontein
Co-founder · ex-Unilever
Spent years inside Unilever watching quality teams do invisible work that kept the business running. Saw how the most important team in food consistently had the worst tools. Started Passionfruit so quality could finally have something built around how the work actually happens. Leads business, customers, and the founder voice on LinkedIn.
Lars Kuijpers
Co-founder · Product
Built the platform from scratch, with quality teams in the room from week one. Designed Passionfruit to fit Excel, Word, Outlook, and Teams — because that's where the work actually happens. Leads product, technical architecture, and the AI/data engineering that makes review-ready output trustable.
The team
A small team, built carefully.
Engineers, designers, and growth people who chose to work on food. We're hiring for AI engineering and customer-facing roles — if the work above sounds like the work you want to do, come build with us.
Boris van den Bemd
Partnership & Growth Lead
Gabby Nunez
Growth & Content
Mitar Ravilic
Full-stack Engineer
Andrea De Masi
Full-stack Engineer
Dmitrii Malyshev
Strategic Advisor
Liesbeth Kamphuis
Strategic Advisor Sustainability and ESG
AI Engineers | Growth
