François Scheffler
dsm-firmenich, Switzerland
Bio:
François Scheffler is EVP of Global Marketing & Business Development at dsm-firmenich, leading strategy, brand, consumer insights, digital, and commercial architecture for a 1.6 billion EUR health ingredients business spanning Dietary Supplements, Early Life Nutrition, Medical Nutrition and Pharma.
With more than 25 years in health and nutrition, François has built his career at the intersection of ingredient science, market creation, and cross-cultural execution. He is currently leading the transformation of dsm-firmenich's commercial model — shifting the organisation from product selling to integrated solution architecture, embedding AI-enabled intelligence across marketing and commercial functions, and designing value propositions that combine clinical efficacy with measurable consumer outcomes.
Prior to dsm-firmenich, François spent 17 years at BASF in global leadership roles in Human Nutrition and Pharma Solutions, most recently as SVP Global Human Nutrition based in Singapore. There, he launched the company's first HMO and Peptides ingredient platforms, and led the business's repositioning from commodity ingredient supply to evidence-based health — a category transition that anticipated the industry's subsequent direction.
A chemical engineer by training, with dual master's degrees from ENSCM Montpellier and the University of Jena, François has lived and worked across Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and Switzerland. He brings deep cross-cultural fluency across both European and Asia-Pacific health and nutrition markets, and speaks French, English, and German.
His work sits at the convergence of precision nutrition, consumer behaviour science, and the growing healthspan economy — making him a distinctive voice on the future of preventive nutrition and science-backed wellbeing.
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