Timothy Childs is a parallel entrepreneur, supertaster and award-winning innovator whose personal approach to creative disruption champions the deployment of new systems to update archaic industries. A pioneer in the food+technology space, Timothy is co-founder and CEO of Treasure8, a San Francisco-based food innovation and technology company on a mission to solve the nutritional challenges and environmental stresses of a growing global population. Timothy and his team develop, patent, and deploy game-changing, delicious food ingredients, processes, and products that are healthier for people and the planet with a keen focus on creating nutritionally dense foods from agricultural and food production remnants.
In 2006, Timothy founded TCHO Chocolate in San Francisco and was the driving and creative force behind the company’s vision and strategy. Timothy created TCHO's flavor-driven / technology based-approach to chocolate making and developed TCHOSource, an innovative project to improve farmers’ livelihoods and generate prosperity throughout the cocoa value chain. Working in partnership with USAID, TCHOSource has become a model for sustainably focused programs in South America, Africa and beyond, improving the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers, their families, and their communities.
Timothy was a participant in the Google Innovation Lab for Food, a global collaborative network for leading thinkers and doers in the food space who apply their knowledge and passion towards imagining and shaping the future of food. He also is the co-founder of the Future Food Center, a 37,000 square-foot food innovation ecosystem on Treasure Island.
Before he brought his Silicon Valley startup innovation approaches to the food industry, Timothy founded a company that developed machine-vision systems for NASA’s Space Shuttle program. His background in technology is deeply rooted in the pre-web internet and early real-time computer graphics (VR) fields. Timothy was directly involved in many early stage internet/computer graphics and virtual reality companies, and co-founded the nonprofit, community-building organizations VeRGe (Virtual Reality Education Foundation in 1991) and the infamous Web3D RoundUP at SIGGRAPH. He continues to embrace advanced computer graphic tools and applications in all of his enterprises.
Timothy is a founding member of the board of Illuminate— presenting organization of The Bay Lights— and a founding member of other CEO boards, such as OSC2. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and has been featured in hundreds of print, broadcast and online stories by major media outlets, including The Economist, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired, Time, and NPR.