Co-Founder of Vegemi & Venner | Driving Global Change in Food Literacy & Childhood Nutrition
Meet Tuulia Järvinen
Tuulia Järvinen is the Co-Founder of Vegemi and Venner, two social ventures transforming food education and access for families and children. With a background in food science, retail, and social impact, she champions food literacy as a public right, not a private responsibility. Tuulia’s work bridges nutrition, education, and policy to address systemic health challenges through scalable, preventive solutions.
A Career Rooted in Systems Thinking
Tuulia’s path to social entrepreneurship began long before Vegemi or Venner took shape. Armed with a Master’s in Food Sciences from the University of Helsinki, she started her career in Finland’s food and retail sector, working her way through roles in category management, key account leadership, and purchasing for well-known companies like Campbell Soup, Life Finland, and Suomen Lähikauppa Oy.
This hands-on exposure to consumer behavior, supply chains, and food marketing planted the early seeds of what would later become her core mission: to challenge the systems that define how we eat and who gets access to health.
“I saw early on how convenience, pricing, and messaging drive food choices and how these forces often work against families, not for them,” Tuulia reflects.
“It’s not enough to teach nutrition. We have to rebuild the environment where choices are made.”
Building Solutions: Venner & Vegemi
In 2018, Tuulia co-founded Venner, a social enterprise tackling food insecurity and wellbeing polarization. Venner’s model pairs healthy groceries with nutrition education, giving vulnerable families not just what to eat, but the confidence and context to eat well. Backed by data-driven outcomes and growing adoption by public-sector partners, Venner quickly became one of Finland’s most recognized examples of food-based social innovation.
Just a few years later, Tuulia co-launched Vegemi in 2022, a playful, science-backed platform that makes food literacy fun, accessible, and exciting for children. Part app, part education method, and part brand collaboration vehicle, Vegemi teaches children about nutrition, gut health, and sustainable choices through games, storytelling, and school-based programs.
At its core, Vegemi delivers more than content, it delivers cultural change. In Tuulia’s words:
“We would never expect children to learn math or reading entirely at home. So why do we expect them to know how to eat well, resist aggressive food marketing, or understand the microbiome, without help?”
A Voice Against Systemic Failure
Tuulia’s public voice is clear and unwavering: childhood obesity, food insecurity, and poor nutrition are not individual failings, they are system failures. Her work frequently challenges the status quo, from calling out the overreliance on ultra-processed foods to questioning the assumption that sports funding alone can curb obesity.
“We cannot outrun a toxic food system,” she has written, citing UNICEF’s global data on rising childhood obesity.
Her posts go beyond advocacy, they are a call to realignment, where education, health, and food policy converge to protect children, not market to them. Whether Whether Vegemi is collaborating with government stakeholders in the GCC, NGO’s in Africa or international schools throughout the MENA region,
the team ensures every partnership is anchored in impact.
Real Results, Human Feedback
The power of Vegemi’s work lies in its everyday reach. Vegemi has received glowing feedback from both educators and parents. In one Saudi school, children began replacing cupcakes with fruit platters after using the app. In Finland, Vegemi’s collaboration with Jordan Oral Care has inspired children to brush their teeth more often, another ripple effect of better food habits.
“Children were fascinated that we have good bacteria living inside us,” one teacher shared. “They started bringing in fruits instead of donuts to school.”
These moments validate Tuulia’s belief that education can be joyful, transformative, and deeply effective, especially when rooted in empathy and delivered with creativity.
A Vision for Scalable, Preventive Nutrition
Tuulia isn’t just thinking local. She’s thinking global and systemic. She envisions a future where nutrition literacy is a standardized part of education systems, healthy food is accessible to every child, and public health is approached preventively, not reactively.
She also champions cross-sector collaboration, from public institutions to private retailers, as essential to transforming how food is sold, taught, and consumed.
“This isn’t about convincing one parent to make a better lunchbox,” she says. “It’s about changing the conditions in which all parents and children live and that requires collective will.”
A Leader for the Next Generation’s Health
Tuulia Järvinen is not waiting for food systems to evolve, she’s rebuilding them now. Her journey from retail strategist to social innovator is a masterclass in systems thinking, courage, and impact-driven leadership. Through Venner and Vegemi, she is rebalancing the scales for families worldwide and challenging the belief that nutrition is a private matter. For Tuulia, it’s a collective responsibility and a shared opportunity to build a healthier, more just world.
