June Jo Lee is a food ethnographer. Food is her portal to understand generational shifts and track early signals of our future. What’s good-to-eat reveals our Modern Hungers — our deepest needs for self-improvement, our desperate desires for connecting deeper, and dreams of our future. How we eat, is eating up our world.

She delivers strategic insights (improvements, innovations, transformations) for organizations to maintain relevance, and sometimes even bend culture. 

There are three parts to her work: (01) ethnographic consulting to support business strategies, (02) ethnographic pop-ups to translate deep insights into design sprints and team builds, and (03) education platform to support food literacy. 

June Jo studied medical and food anthropology at Harvard, and has spent her career working as an ethnographer for consumer packaged brands (Nestle, Pepsi, General Mills, Kraft and more), retailers (from Walmart to Whole Foods Market), and food service (Google, R/A, ISS, UMass Amherst).

She served as VP of Strategic Insights at The Hartman Group, leading their qualitative consumer research for global food brands. Since 2014, she has served as Resident Food Ethnographer for Google’s Workplace Services that feeds their employees breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in 57 countries.

She is a speaker at national food and education conferences, co-founder of Readers To Eaters, and is co-author of two picture book biographies, Sandor Katz and The Tiny Wild (2022) and award-winning Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix (2017).

For a taste of her work, see her TED talk and Natural Expo keynote, and also her Nutrients paper. 

June Jo grew up transnationally between Korea, California and Texas, eating her mom’s ‘alien’ kimchi. San Francisco is home.