Tikehau Capital appoints Laurent-David Charbit as co-head of its private equity regenerative agriculture practice

15 December 2022

• The appointment follows the creation of a global private equity impact strategy dedicated to investing in projects and companies supporting and accelerating the regenerative agriculture transition, in partnership with AXA and Unilever.
• Laurent-David Charbit will co-head the strategy alongside Hélène Henry-Prince, Executive Director and co-head of the regenerative agriculture private equity practice.

Tikehau Capital, the global alternative asset manager, today announced the appointment of Laurent-David Charbit as co-head of its private equity regenerative agriculture practice.

Laurent-David, who will be based in London, brings strong transaction sourcing capabilities to the role, as well as an established network with direct access to the market and its clients having spent the past 12 years at Unilever.

At Unilever, Laurent-David held various roles in Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands and the UK, including Procurement Director in Packaging, Vice President Sustainable Sourcing for Commodities & Ingredients and Procurement Excellence and most recently, Vice President Climate and Sustainability for the group. He started his career in supply chain at Michelin in Hong Kong, before joining McKinsey, and he also led supply chain and procurement at Albéa, a leading supplier of packaging to the beauty sector.

The firm’s regenerative agriculture strategy, which launched earlier this year in partnership with Unilever and AXA, seeks to raise more than €1 billion to accelerate the regenerative agriculture transition, and Laurent-David’s appointment reinforces Tikehau Capital’s commitment to strengthening this strategy as well as its private equity impact platform more broadly.

With agriculture, land use change, and deforestation representing the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, Tikehau Capital’s regenerative agriculture strategy aims to enable practices in this sector to happen at scale, by focusing on three core areas:

• Inputs: bio-control, seeds & breeds, animal feed, bio-stimulants / fertilizers, biochar …
• Equipment and farming operations: water management, automation & robotics, precision agriculture, methanisation and agrivoltaism
• Ingredients: plant-based dairy alternatives, sustainable oleochemicals, fermentation and insect-based alternatives

”We are delighted to welcome Laurent-David to Tikehau Capital as we continue to build on the success of our private equity impact platform. We strongly believe that our regenerative agriculture practice strategy is well positioned to accelerate the paradigm shift towards a more resilient agri-food sector, in close collaboration with stakeholders across the food value chain. Ultimately, it is about restoring the health of the soil to ensure there is a healthy and sustainable food supply chain for all. We wish Laurent-David all the best in his new role,” stated Emmanuel Laillier, Tikehau Capital’s head of Private Equity.

Source: Tikehau Capital