Shirinda Pulluru

Food & Wine Strategy Consultant

Since 2026, Shirinda P. Pulluru is an IGCAT expert representing Asia, with a career built across food systems in three continents. As Communications Consultant at the institute, her work centres on what the existing regional network has done well and how those lessons can strengthen it and support the identification of new European and World Regions of Gastronomy.

With a career that began in food science, she started at Amul, one of Asia’s largest dairy cooperatives, and went on to build spirits and food manufacturing facilities in India, the Gulf and East Africa. An MBA in Food and Wine at the University of Bologna gave her a new lens: the food traditions she had grown up with in India were not distant from the ones she was discovering across Southern Europe, but expressions of the same craft, heritage and generational knowledge. That realisation never left. It took her back to India, where she worked with tribal coffee growers in Araku Valley to protect and tell the story of their biodiversity-conscious estates.

She is currently exploring the restoration of Casa de São Jorge, a Roman-era heritage property in Portugal’s Douro wine region, as a cultural and enotourism site. She holds a WINTOUR Masters in Wine Tourism Innovation (University of Porto, 2026).