June Jo Lee

Background

About June Jo Lee

June Jo Lee is a food ethnographer. Food is her portal to understand generational shifts and track early signals of our future. What’s good-to-eat reveals our Modern Hungers — our deepest needs for self-improvement, our desperate desires for connecting deeper, and dreams of our future. How we eat, is eating up our world. She delivers strategic insights (improvements, innovations, transformations) for organizations to maintain relevance, and sometimes even bend culture. There are three parts to her work:(01) ethnographic consulting to support business strategies,(02) ethnographic pop-ups to translate deep insights into design sprints and team builds, and (03) education platform to support food literacy. June Jo studied medical and food anthropology at Harvard, and has spent her career working as an ethnographer for consumer packaged brands (Nestle, Pepsi, General Mills and more), retailers (from Walmart to Whole Foods Market), and food service (Google, R/A, ISS, UMass Amherst). For a decade, she served as resident Food Ethnographer for Google’s Workplace Services that feeds their employees breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in 57 countries. Previously, she was VP of Strategic Insights at The Hartman Group, leading their qualitative consumer research for food brands. She is a speaker at national food and education conferences, co-founder of Readers To Eaters, and is author of picture book biographies SANDOR KATZ AND THE TINY WILD (2022) and CHEF ROY CHOI AND THE STREET FOOD REMIX (2017). For a taste of her work, see go.ted.com/junejolee and her Foodlife Questions June Jo grew up transnationally between Korea, California and Texas, eating her mom’s ‘alien’ kimchi. San Francisco is home.