Biography
Mr. William (Bill) Perell has more than three decades of experience conceiving, developing, and commercializing innovative products and business methodologies. As a founding director of Vivia Foundation, Mr. Perell focuses his efforts on inventing and developing globally applicable solutions aimed at minimizing food and packaging waste. Mr. Perell creates food security solutions for company brands, consumer loyalty and to improve social livelihoods in established and emerging markets.
As an inventor, Bill lead the development of a suite of patents for cost-effective packaging, providing innovative approaches to global packaging issues. Around the world, he has filed over 175 patents and trademark applications for his inventions; more than 150 have issued. These patents and trademarks cover countries representing more than two-thirds of the world’s population.
Bill co-invented the world’s first buyer-determined pricing and bidding system for the travel industry. He applied for the first patent on buyer-determined pricing, a methodology now widely used in the online arena for liquid pricing of fungible goods and services. Two decades ago, he conceived and implemented the electronic “bid-and-ask” marketplace for the travel industry. This system is now widely used, accounting for billions of dollars of e-commerce industry revenues.
After working in the consumer goods industry as an assistant product manager for Colgate-Palmolive, Bill co-founded Agraport, a bulk food import and export firm. As a Senior Partner for Agraport, he was an agri-products buyer, seller and financier, responsible for multi-million dollar international shipments of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, rice, coffee, cocoa, and sugar. Mr. Perell has diverse and extensive management experience developing and improving agricultural and food processing facilities which are applicable to the needs, productivity and improved income of farmers. He has a broad background in international commercial and business negotiation.
Bill has conducted business throughout the world including Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Central America, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zaire, Kenya, South Africa, the Americas, and Europe. He is fully comfortable transacting business in almost every corner of the world.
He is fluent in English and French, and speaks conversational Spanish. Mr. Perell is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Tuck Business School in the United States.