In a world where nutrition, health, and sustainability are shaping global priorities, true impact is created by leaders who connect science with people, and strategy with execution. Petra den Dikken, Director of R&D, Quality & Sustainability Performance Nutrition at Prinsen Berning, represents a new generation of leadership in performance nutrition—one that moves beyond technical silos to build coherence across systems, teams, and purpose.
Operating at the intersection of R&D, quality, sustainability, and executive decision-making, Petra leads international R&D and Quality teams while serving on the company’s management team. She is responsible for the development of nutritional bars and powders for both leading brands and private-label customers, placing innovation at the heart of Prinsen Berning’s performance nutrition offering. Her work is driven by a passion for delivering healthy sustainable solutions that excel in taste, texture and nutritional performance.
At the core of her leadership philosophy is a clear conviction: performance only endures when it serves a purpose people can believe in. By leading in a deeply context-driven way and explaining not only what is decided, but why, she creates environments where people contribute with confidence, responsibility, and pride—proving that when people belong, performance moves with purpose.
She sees leadership as an orchestra, where impact is born not from solo brilliance, but from disciplines listening, aligning, and moving as one. By uniting science, processes, and people around a shared purpose, Petra creates performance that resonates long after the music stops
Rooted in a Small Village, Reaching for Something Larger
Petra grew up in Giessenburg, a small village in the Dutch countryside. The eldest of three children, she developed a natural curiosity and a quiet inner compass early on, a set of values that guided her toward what was right rather than what was popular. Academic ambition and a serious commitment to classical music were not the prevailing norms in her secondary school years. She faced a choice that many ambitious young people face, adapt to fit in or stay true to herself. She chose authenticity, and that choice became the foundation of everything that followed.
Her path into food technology was deliberate. She studied at the College of Agricultural Sciences (Agrarische Hogeschool) Delft before continuing at Wageningen University and Research, one of the world’s foremost institutions in life sciences and agri-food. What drew her to the field was its integrative character, the way it blends chemistry, physics, and biology with human behavior and societal responsibility. For her, food is not just a product. It is where science meets everyday life, and where the right decisions carry real weight for people’s health.
Her mother, who had missed her own opportunity to study, encouraged her ambition without conditions. Her music teacher taught her that discipline and emotional impact are inseparable. She carries those lessons directly into her work today. These early influences help explain why she leads the way she does: attentive, unhurried when it matters, and deeply invested in the people around her.
A Career Built on Systems, People, and Trust
The first chapter of Petra’s professional life unfolded at Unilever, where she completed her Wageningen studies while working in a highly structured international organization. The experience gave her a command of scale, rigor, and the discipline of building systems that hold up under complexity. She learned how decisions ripple through value chains, and how quality only works when standards are explicit, ownership is clear, and people understand why choices are made.
FrieslandCampina marked her transition into leadership. In 2007, she began by managing a small team and successfully expanded her leadership to large teams. There, she deepened her expertise in cheese quality, infant nutrition, and the development of R&D and quality systems. International audits took her across diverse cultures and governance contexts, broadening her understanding of how standards work or fail in practice. This was where she discovered her capacity to translate strategy into daily actions, not through instruction, but through clarity, context, and trust.
Danone added a medical nutrition dimension. In her role as Research & Innovation Director she worked with her team on the high-protein drinks for patients, tube feeding solutions, areas where scientific rigor, regulatory compliance, and patient safety leave no room for compromise. “The Danone years also taught me something equally important, which is the significance of cultural fitness,” she says. I have grown more adaptable as a leader while remaining true to myself.
Leading Through a Pandemic — On Foot
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Petra worked at FrieslandCampina. The sudden removal of physical interaction hit her hard. She found it extremely difficult to spend entire days behind a screen without real human contact, and she recognized that her team members felt the same. While others leaned entirely on digital tools, she took a different approach.
She made a conscious decision to meet every team member in person safely and responsibly by going for weekly walks near their homes. She conducted her one-to-one conversations while walking, taking a photograph at each stop. When she eventually left the organization, the team compiled those photographs into a video, a gesture that captured exactly what the experience meant to everyone involved. Technology kept the work moving.
Walking kept the people connected. The pandemic confirmed a belief she already held that leadership is about proximity to people, especially when distance makes that proximity difficult. She emerged from the experience with a more intentional approach to working rhythm, which aims on valuing the focused clarity that working from home occasionally offers, while protecting the informal energy that only physical presence creates.
Connecting Everything at Prinsen Berning
When Petra joined Prinsen Berning, she found a role that brings everything together. Her mandate spans research and development, quality assurance, and sustainability, three functions that, in many organizations, operate in parallel rather than in concert. She runs them as a single integrated system, drawing on her background in formulation science, ingredient technology, manufacturing, governance, and customer collaboration.
Petra deliberately chose Prinsen Berning for its agile way of working, diverse customer portfolio, and the level of responsibility held at executive level. Rather than operating within multiple decision-making layers, the role allows her to take full end-to-end accountability and translate strategy directly into action. In this environment, her experience from large multinationals can be applied with greater impact, shaping decisions, products and outcomes.
The company’s purpose, “We Move Performance,” is both an organizational mission and a personal leadership pledge.
A Culture of Growth and Innovation at Prinsen Berning
Prinsen Berning is Europe’s leading one-stop shop for protein bars and active nutrition powders, serving both market leading brands and retail private labels. Founded in 2017 through the merger of Koninklijke Prinsen and Gustav Berning—two companies each with over a century of expertise—the group has grown into one of Europe’s largest sports nutrition manufacturers.
In 2024, the Dutch entity was awarded the Royal Warrant, operating as Koninklijke Prinsen B.V., and the company recently received the Eco Vadis Bronze Medal, ranking it among the top 35% globally for sustainability performance.
Prinsen Berning fosters a culture centered on investment and innovation, always aiming to make a meaningful impact. Reflecting this ethos, the company is further expanding its bar and powder manufacturing capacity and has recently acquired the neighboring building in Germany, presenting a greenfield opportunity for continued growth in bars in the coming years.
Working in a binational organization also requires a particular kind of cultural intelligence. Berning’s German culture brings structure and precision. Prinsen’s Brabant culture contributes to openness and pragmatism.
Integrating Innovation, Quality, and Sustainability in Leadership
“Innovation is truly at the heart of what we do at Prinsen Berning,” she says. “By combining deep expertise with a real understanding of our customers, we develop protein bars and nutritional powders with great precision. Working closely with customers throughout the entire process allows us to create healthier, distinctive solutions that keep pace with changing trends in ingredients, textures, and packaging.”
“We Move Performance” encapsulates both her organizational purpose and personal leadership promise. Her goal is to connect innovation, quality, and sustainability into a unified system, translating strategy into actionable choices that teams can implement every day.
Her approach to Quality is one of the clearest expressions of her philosophy. “Most quality leaders position their function as a checkpoint, a gate through which products must pass,” she expresses. She frames quality as a confidence-builder, the foundation that allows teams to move faster, not slower.
“When the underlying systems are strong, teams earn the permission to be bold. Speed and rigor are not opposites. They reinforce each other,” she argues.
Sustainability, too, she treats not as a reporting obligation but as a design constraint that sharpens every decision.
From ingredient sourcing and packaging formats including the sustainable doy-pack line now coming online in Helmond to waste reduction in manufacturing, sustainability sits at the start of the development process, not at the end.
Prinsen Berning collaborates with Wageningen University and Research.”We participate in programs like GLP-1 consortium and “Redesign Food for Value”. Redesign Food for Value is a collaborative innovation program led by a Foodvalley-based consortium and supported and co-funded by EIT Food (EU/EIT).
The program brings together expertise from across the food value chain to accelerate the development of next-generation bars and powder concepts for targeted and sport nutrition.
“Redesign Food for Value reflects my purpose for connecting people and expertise across the value chain. Together, we develop science-based nutrition solutions—bars and powders—that support specific consumer needs and make sustainability a practical reality” she says.
Through co-creation, Prinsen Berning develops products that deliver validated health benefits, excellent sensory performance, and measurable reductions in environmental impact, contributing directly to market-ready innovation for customers.
Balance as Alignment, Not Division
When asked about work-life balance, Petra reframes the question immediately. “Balance, for me, is not a split; it is alignment. I pursue it through three deliberate rhythms: strategy, execution, and recovery. Strategy keeps my priorities anchored to purpose. Execution moves work forward through clear decisions and simple governance. Recovery protects my energy, because sustainable performance requires energy, not just effort.
Her weekends are genuinely hers. She draws a firm mental boundary between the working week and the weekend. She spends time outdoors with her husband and their two children, walks in nature, and attends concerts. She takes pride in successfully balancing a leadership position with raising two young children alongside her husband.
Additionally, she values the ability to trust both her physical and intuitive signals, regarding them as valuable assets for performance rather than inconveniences.
Her personal habits are consistent and deliberate. She eats a healthy diet with good nutrition and stays active by doing light exercise regularly. These are not extreme regimes.
They are steady routines that protect long-term energy, the same logic she applies to organizational performance.
Music shapes her life and leadership. She enjoys playing flute in ensembles and orchestras. From an early age, classical music has been her greatest passion. Attending and performing concerts is more than just relaxation for her; it is a source of inspiration and creativity. Music plays a central part in how she spends her weekends, helping her truly unwind and recharge.
Performing requires discipline, excellence, and commitment to the group “These experiences have shaped how I lead: I listen with intent, hold myself and others to high standards, and take full accountability for my role”. Music has taught her that real impact is never individual-it is created through trust, alignment, and shared ambition. These principles are fundamental to how she works with others and how she leads.
Strengths, Edges, and What She Has Learned
Petra identifies approachability as one of her core strengths. People speak openly with her, which means problems surface before they become crises.
Her ability to see patterns, connecting disciplines, stakeholders, and signals that appear unrelated let her anticipate where a system is heading and picture the future state clearly before others notice it arriving.
She describes her thinking as chess-like, several moves ahead, attentive to second and third-order consequences. But she is candid about the learning edge this creates. When you see far ahead, she acknowledges that it is easy to move too quickly to pull the team forward before they have built their own understanding of the destination.
She has learned to pace herself intentionally, to create alignment before acceleration, and to let others contribute fully to the direction. The best outcomes, she says, are built together.
Throughout her career, she has been driven by the core belief that strategy only matters when it works in practice.
At Prinsen Berning, her key accomplishment was developing an integrated Innovation and Quality & Food Safety strategy and designing the supporting organization to execute it. She believes strategy only matters when roles, governance, and processes are properly aligned.
She developed that conviction at an earlier stage in her career. At FrieslandCampina, she learned how robust quality systems and disciplined specification- and change management enable consistent global execution, from award-winning Quality cheese operations to international infant nutrition launches. At Danone, she experienced the impact of innovation close to the patient, leading to the development of medical and protein nutrition solutions, including the first plant-based medical nutrition for tube and oral use.
Across roles and companies, her journey reflects a consistent focus on connecting strategy, people and processes to deliver meaningful, sustainable results.
Advice for the Leaders Who Come Next
Petra’s advice to aspiring leaders is grounded and specific.
Stay authentic, lead in the way that fits who you are and allow others to do the same. You do not need to become someone else to be an effective leader. Lead in a way that fits who you are and allow others to do the same. When purpose, trust, and collaboration come together, excellence is built gradually—step by step, and always together.
Build depth before visibility, invest in expertise and understanding. For those who aspire to lead, it is vital to prioritize depth over immediate visibility. Focus on developing expertise and gaining a thorough understanding of your field. Let your actions and results consistently demonstrate quality and substance, allowing your reputation to grow organically. True leadership endures when it is founded on competency and credibility, rather than on a quest for recognition.
Stay curious and stay close to context.
Maintain a mindset of curiosity and remain closely connected to the reality in which you operate. Strive to see the complete picture: the people, systems, culture, and the long-term effects of decisions. Choices only hold when they make sense in the world others work in. Practice active listening, ask thoughtful questions, and resist the temptation to oversimplify complex situations.
“I don’t know yet” is not a weakness; it is often the beginning of real learning.
Do not shy away from uncertainty. Admitting that you do not have all the answers creates space for growth. Progress happens when you move beyond what feels comfortable. Do not be afraid to ask for support—working with a coach or mentor can help you reflect more deeply, challenge patterns you no longer see, and accelerate learning.
Protect your non-negotiables.
Identify and uphold your core values and boundaries. Reflection is not a luxury—it is a performance skill. Pay attention to internal signals and to what you observe in others, and act on them early. Sustainable leadership always starts with effective self-leadership.
Leadership is never a solo act.
Like an orchestra, meaningful impact arises from listening, alignment, and shared direction. Foster environments where people feel safe to speak up, where differences are valued, and where collective achievements are celebrated. When individuals feel seen and trusted, they contribute with confidence.
Moving Performance — Together
There is a reason that Prinsen Berning’s purpose, “We Move Performance,” resonates so completely with Petra. It describes exactly what she believes about leadership, about business, and about life. Performance is not a destination. It is a continuous act of alignment between people, purpose, quality, and care, something you maintain, and something you build together.
From a small village in the Dutch countryside to the directorship of one of Europe’s most technically demanding food businesses, Petra den Dikken has built a career on substance, authenticity, and the quiet conviction that when people belong, they contribute — and when they contribute together toward something purposeful, the results are repeatable, trusted, and lasting.
