Cristina Espejo is leading the People & Culture agenda at Atlantic Sapphire, including, culture development and integration, succession management, learning & development, workforce planning, talent acquisition and employee life cycle engagement, people technology, executive development and diversity and inclusion. In 2019 she joined Atlantic Sapphire where she currently serves as the Chief People Officer at their Headquarters in Miami. In her current role as Chief People Officer she is accountable to the CEO for the enterprises’ People Strategy agenda. She is member of the Senior Leadership and part of the Board Compensation Committee. Works closely on culture development, diversity & inclusion, succession planning at all levels of the enterprise and is responsible for all facets of HR. Known for her transformational energetic, optimistic leadership and purpose driven style, she brings human capital solutions aligned to Atlantic Sapphire business strategy. Has vast experience leading companywide transformations and conducting organizational designs, change management and growth through leading edge technologies. Most recently she is focused on driving the culture throughout the employee lifecycle and creating the Atlantic Sapphire Academy, an internal university to support fast and consistent scaling up.
Atlantic Sapphire is a Norwegian publicly traded company with its operational headquarters in Miami and operations in Europe and in the US. The company is pioneering BluehouseR (land-raised) salmon farming locally and transforming protein production globally by building the world’s largest, full-cycle-land-based salmon farming facility located in Homestead, Florida. Atlantic Sapphire is valued at almost $1Billion currently and business strategic plan aims to produce 220T of salmon a year (equivalent of 1.3Billion meals of salmon a year).
Cristina joined Atlantic Sapphire, Inc. in March of 2019 during this time she has enables the scaling up of the operations by focusing mainly on maintaining and achieving a high-performance culture, detailing talent strategy and execution plan, implementing structure on areas as HR and environmental and social action plan to develop exponential scaling. Her leadership has enabled a growth of 430% since her incorporation. Although the business model is defined as slim on number of employees considering company revenue, it is expected the headcount in the next years to reach several thousand employees.
Ms. Espejo is an accomplished executive director and board member with more than 15 years of success across a broad array of industries such as salmon farming, food & beverage, engineering, services, climate change, retail and distribution, maritime, oil and gas, and infrastructure. Leveraging her extensive experience in management in fast growing organizations. Dynamic, innovative and performance-driven executive experienced in balancing the human resources toolkit to ensure long term contributions to the top and bottom line of sustainability-driven companies.
Mrs. Espejo’s experience includes positions in various industries around the world. From 2016 to January 2019, she served as Executive Director of NA People Department for Cosentino, in Miami, Florida,. Cosentino NA was represented with 1300 employees with an overall revenue of $800M (of $1Billion globally). She was a member of the Executive team for North America, reporting to the CEO and Deputy President in Spain and a member of the Benefits Committee.
Between 2004 and 2016, Cristina held different Executive positions at Det Norske Veritas. From 2013 to 2016, she acted as the Director of HR and Global HSE, BA Americas for DNV GL in Houston, Texas. She worked closely with the COO, Controller and Global HR Director. Her responsibilities were 60% regional and 40% globally. Responsible for implementing strategies for over 2400 people globally and was known for ability to support fast scaling up businesses, responsible for establishing workforce planning processes and succession planning, she also was the Business Assurance Global HSE Director supporting and establishing ESG matrix and safety culture. From 2008 to 2012, Cristina was named Global HR and Competence Manager, advising the Managing Director and global leadership team on world climate changes and environment services. She supported extraordinary growth objectives through global talent acquisition and development programs. It was at this time that she created an internal global forum to support and drive Diversity & Inclusion in DNV GL. From 2007 and 2008 she was assigned as the HR Senior Consultant Generalist at DNV in Houston, Texas. Cristina acted as a consultant and trusted advisor to the business areas of Oil & Gas, Maritime and Business Assurance in USA and Mexico.
From 2005 and 2007, she worked as HR Director, DNV Angola (People Processes Head of Section (HR, QHSE and Administration) in Luanda, Angola. Supported the Country Manager in the Oil and Gas Industry, lead a team of 6 and oversaw 117 employees. During 2004 and 2005 Cristina held the positions of Marketing & Sales Director, DNV Angola at Luanda, Angola. She was responsible for sales and marketing for the oil and gas consulting services in West Africa.
Mrs. Espejo completed the Global Leadership Program at INSEAD and has earned a master’s degree in Corporate Social Responsibility (Sustainability), she also has a post-graduate in HR Management and Services from the Universitat de Barcelona. Cristina has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Management from the Universidad CEU San Pablo.