Operator, not advisor
Your product isn't a commodity. It's just being sold like one.
I'm Tony Sberna. For 30 years I've found the commercial value trapped inside food, ag, and biotechnology companies - then built the team, the capital, and the brand to unlock it.
Most consultants hand you a strategy and leave. I stay until something is selling.
+500%
Net margin lift turning a commodity oil into a branded industrial product - Cargill
$27M+
In customer term sheets spinning a food-tech company out of a biotech platform - Smallfood
2×
Food sales doubled in three years by shifting from commodity to value-added - Ocean Nutrition
15
New SKUs on U.S. shelves in six months for a market-entry client - Strategia3
The Commodity Trap
Most companies leave money on the table by letting their product be treated like a commodity.
- the pattern behind every engagement below
It happens quietly. A genuinely valuable product, technology, or ingredient gets sold by the truckload, priced off the board, competing on nothing but cost. The margin erodes. The brand never forms. The category decides it's a commodity - and everyone accepts the verdict.
The customers usually haven't. They just haven't been offered anything else.
My work is to find where that value is trapped, give it a story worth paying a premium for, and build the business that actually captures it - capital, team, partnerships, and all.
How I work · The Trapped-Value Method
Find it. Reframe it. Build it. Sell it.
Four engagements across food, ag, biotech, and commodities - the same repeatable move every time. Not a deck. A business that's selling when I'm done.
01
Find the trapped value
Diagnose exactly where commercial value is stuck - commodity pricing, IP siloed inside a parent, margins plateaued despite a strong product.
02
Reframe the offer
Reposition from commodity to branded, value-added category - and translate the science into one unified commercial story investors and customers can underwrite.
03
Build team & capital
Recruit the C-suite and advisory bench, structure the capital, line up investors, and negotiate the off-take and manufacturing that make it real.
04
Drive it to selling
Execute every track in parallel until there's revenue: term sheets signed, supply agreements closed, products on shelves.
"The work isn't done until something is selling."
Execution-first, every time