Our Team

Romain Giraudet has nine years of experience in sustainable supply chains and human rights and environmental due diligence in tropical agriculture. He started his career managing sustainability operations on the ground, working directly with cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast and coffee farming communities in rural Indonesia. He then joined Firmenich and dsm-firmenich, where he led the global supply chain sustainability and due diligence department, managing a worldwide portfolio of up to 2 million USD per year in operational costs. Over that period, he oversaw 60 supply chain assessments and 20 sustainability and remediation projects across all major natural ingredient producing regions. His HREDD expertise covers the full cycle: from desktop risk screening and field assessments to remediation project design and implementation, with strong operational knowledge of tropical agriculture, farming community livelihoods, child labour, forced labour and working conditions in complex tropical environments. He built and rolled out the group’s first HREDD framework aligned with CSDDD and EUDR and was elected by peer companies to the steering committees of industry coalitions on child labour and living income in Turkey and Egypt, convened by the Fair Labor Association.

Hélène Giraudet has eight years of experience in complex project governance, rural development and tropical agri-food value chains. At Université de Bordeaux, she spent four years managing a portfolio of around 50 innovation projects across three programmes, operating under executive committee sponsorship in a highly decentralised organisation with diverse internal and external stakeholders. She led steering committees and managed calls for proposal, working across all departments and schools as part of the university’s corporate services. Earlier in her career, she worked for IRD, a French national research institute, in Indonesia, where she implemented and monitored an innovative sustainable aquaculture system with extension agents of the Indonesian Ministry of Fisheries and local fish farmer communities. She co-organised and served as Secretary General of an international congress on the ecological intensification of aquaculture, bringing together over 200 participants from 15 countries across three days. In Cambodia, she created and led the R&D department of a tropical food company, overseeing product development and certification audits, and co-founded the Thnot d’Or Award, a rural development competition. She has served as a jury member since 2018, with ceremonies regularly presided over by Cambodian senior government officials including ministers and, most recently, a Deputy Prime Minister.

Alissa Hervouët has nine years of experience in tropical agricultural operations, rural supply chain structuring and field-based due diligence across Africa and Southeast Asia. At AgriResources Madagascar, she spent three years directing vanilla operations, managing a team of up to 100 staff across sourcing, processing, quality, traceability and export. She managed three sourcing channels covering over 25 villages and 900 producers and built a traceability system from scratch. She was then selected by the Group CEO to lead business development across Africa, conducting a full audit of a cocoa transformation facility in Benin, structuring a shea butter value chain from a nature reserve and assessing vanilla operations in Comoros. In 2026, she was engaged as a consultant to run two sourcing campaigns: mango purchasing, traceability and local processing in northern Ivory Coast, and vanilla purchasing, traceability and processing in Madagascar for a local operator, managing field teams through both.

Esther de Chassey has ten years of professional experience, including six years in conservation operations, protected area management and strategic planning across Africa. Most recently, she spent nearly three years in the Office of the CEO at African Parks, reporting directly to the CEO and driving network-wide initiatives on operational standards, audit frameworks and governance. She had earlier developed the framework, roadmap and toolkit for the organisation’s internal operational audits, including auditors’ checklists for 15 standard operating procedures. As Park Manager for Noé at the newly established Binder Léré national park in Chad, she led all park activities across community engagement, conservation, law enforcement and infrastructure, grew the team from 35 to 70 staff, ensured compliant execution of AFD and EU grants and managed relations with government, traditional authorities and the 120,000 people living within the reserve. Earlier at African Parks, as Special Projects Manager at Parc National d’Odzala-Kokoua in the Republic of Congo, she managed a grant portfolio of 14 donors including the European Union, USFWS and UNESCO, coordinated strategic planning and contributed to the signing of a 15-year revised public-private partnership with the Congolese government.