The beauty industry runs on a specific kind of anxiety. Buy more. Layer more. Fix more. The average skincare routine has expanded steadily for two decades, and the brands behind it have grown rich on the premise that your skin always needs something else. Angela Ursem spent more than twenty years inside the machinery that makes that kind of growth possible. She understands it at a molecular level. She helped build it. And then she walked away from it to make the opposite argument.
The Woman Who Knows Both Sides:
Angela Ursem is the Co-Founder of Food for Skin, a circular premium skincare brand built on the conviction that modern beauty routines have become unnecessarily complicated, and that the industry profiting from that complexity has very little incentive to simplify it. She is not a newcomer making bold claims from the outside. She is someone who spent decades on the inside, and decided that made her argument harder to ignore.
From Coty to Heineken to the Question That Wouldn’t Go Away:
Ursem’s career began in the mid-1990s at Coty Inc., managing prestige brands including Davidoff, Lancaster, and Joop! across the Benelux market and spending time at headquarters in Paris. It was a rigorous introduction to brand building at scale, the kind of training that teaches you how consumer perception is constructed and how purchasing behavior is shaped before most people have even articulated what they want.
From there, she moved into digital marketing at Heineken at a moment when the internet was still an open question for global consumer brands. She took end-to-end responsibility for all digital communications across the Heineken brand globally, managing country websites and online marketing activation across the Middle East and Africa simultaneously. It was a role that demanded both strategic clarity and operational precision, and it sharpened something in her that would matter later: the ability to communicate impact credibly, at scale, without losing the thread of what the brand actually stood for.
The years that followed took her through G-Star RAW, where she led global communications, through JOOLZ, where she served as Global Marketing Director and helped build out an e-commerce platform, and through Nike, where she ran the EMEA meetings and events department. Each role added a layer. Each company operated at a different scale and in a different category, but the underlying work was consistent: understand what a brand believes, then make the world believe it too.
The role that sharpened her most arrived in 2018. At Tony’s Chocolonely, the Dutch chocolate brand that had built its entire identity around fighting exploitation in the cocoa supply chain, Ursem served first as International Brand Captain and then as head of global marketing communications. Tony’s was not a typical consumer brand. It was a mission with a product attached, and communicating that mission required a discipline she had not encountered in the same form anywhere else. “At Tony’s Chocolonely I learned that impact communication has to be bold, but never vague,” she has said. The lesson stuck.
By 2020, after more than two decades of building other people’s brands, Ursem co-founded Food for Skin. The timing looked like a pivot. It was really a conclusion.
The Brand That Asks You to Stop Buying:
Food for Skin launched with a philosophy that cuts against almost everything the beauty industry is built on. Less, but better skincare. Not a new product category. Not a new ingredient trend. A direct challenge to the assumption that more steps, more products, and more complexity produce better skin.
The brand makes circular, vegan skincare from upcycled natural ingredients, produced primarily in the Netherlands, free from microplastics, toxins, and artificial perfumes. It has been B Corp certified since 2023. It has won two Golden Dutch Beauty Awards. It now serves roughly 20,000 customers, and the metric Ursem watches most carefully is not acquisition. It is return.
“The metrics that mattered most were returning customer revenue, repeat purchase behaviour, customer reviews, referrals and the fact that people came back not just for one product, but for the philosophy behind the brand.” That distinction matters. A customer who returns for a product is a transaction. A customer who returns for a philosophy is something closer to a community, and communities are harder to build and harder to lose.
The product architecture was a deliberate choice made early. Rather than launching a wide range and expanding into every possible category, Food for Skin built a focused routine. Easy to understand. Highly effective. Repeatable. It is the kind of restraint that feels obvious in hindsight and is almost impossible to maintain under commercial pressure. Ursem has maintained it. “We deliberately say no to unnecessary product steps, artificial complexity, trend-led launches, fear-based claims and ingredients that do not fit our standards.”
That discipline has required real trade-offs. Rejecting cheaper packaging and sourcing routes that would have looked premium but did not meet the brand’s circular standards created genuine constraints around cost, supplier availability, and development speed. Ursem accepted a more disciplined pace rather than compromise on what the brand had promised. For her, highly effective and genuinely responsible are not competing claims. They are the same claim, or they mean nothing at all.
The next chapter is already in motion. Ursem is focused on scaling Food for Skin into one of Europe’s leading circular premium skincare brands by 2030, and she is actively seeking the strategic retail partnerships, distribution agreements, and growth capital that can make that possible. The goal is not to prove that sustainable beauty can survive in a niche. It is to prove it can win at scale.
The Argument That Compounds:
Angela Ursem did not need to start over. She had the credentials, the network, and the track record to spend the rest of her career inside companies that were already large and already winning. She chose instead to build something that asks an uncomfortable question of the industry she knows best.
The beauty market has spent decades telling consumers their skin needs more. Food for Skin is Ursem’s answer to what happens when someone who helped build that argument decides it was wrong.
Twenty-five years of knowing how growth works turned out to be the exact preparation needed to question whether it should.
Angela Ursem is the Co-Founder of Food for Skin, a circular premium skincare brand based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Food for Skin creates vegan, B Corp certified skincare from upcycled natural ingredients, designed for customers who want simpler, more effective, and more responsible beauty routines. To connect with Angela or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/angelaursem or http://foodforskin.care.
