Most consultants working in AI search have never sold a product on a shelf. Most consultants working in premium food and beverage have never thought seriously about how AI systems form opinions.

This practice exists in the gap between those two worlds.

I spent 12 years in premium food and beverage — Italian wine importing, Napa Valley wineries, and building Nespresso's partnerships with the James Beard Foundation and Michelin Guide. I've worked the floor as a sommelier at a two-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco. I know what it takes to build a brand that earns trust at the table, not just on the shelf.

I spent the following 5 years at NetSuite earning President's Club, selling enterprise software to growing CPG companies. That's where I learned how the operational and commercial infrastructure behind premium brands actually works — and where I first started watching AI reshape how buyers find and evaluate products.

When I left that career, I wasn't looking for the next sales role. I was looking for work that used everything I'd built — the F&B credibility, the commercial instincts, the pattern recognition from watching hundreds of brands navigate growth. AI discoverability strategy for premium F&B is where all of it converges.

What that means in practice

I don't translate AI jargon into F&B language, or F&B nuance into generic marketing strategy. I work at the intersection because I've lived on both sides of it.

When I run an audit for a premium olive oil brand, I understand why their positioning as a finishing oil matters for how AI classifies them. When I build content strategy for a performance beverage founder, I understand the difference between benefit-driven positioning and occasion-based authority — and which one their brand actually has.

The Signal Engineering framework I use isn't borrowed from B2B content strategy or generic SEO practice. It was built from the specific way premium F&B brands earn authority — through editorial credibility, sommelier culture, food media, and the kind of third-party trust signals that AI systems have learned to weight.

A note on this practice

I'm selective about who I work with because Voice Mapping only works when there's something genuinely distinct to map. The brands I do my best work for have a real point of view, a differentiated product, and a founder who understands that brand identity isn't just positioning language — it's the raw material that makes AI recommendation possible.

If that's you, I'd like to talk.