Our Team
Sarah Bellos, CEO and Founder, has been working with indigo and natural dyes since 2006, having previously managed a textile dye house offering garment and piece dyeing with plant based color. A graduate of the Cornell University Agriculture School with a degree in Natural Resources Management, she has managed small farms and worked across the food and agriculture sector. Sarah developed Stony Creek Colors to build a new future for natural color harnessing advancements in sustainable agriculture, crop development, and chemical and process engineering. Sarah has been a recognized leader in research efforts to bring bio-based colorant production to farmers in the Southeastern U.S. In 2015, Bellos was awarded the Young Entrepreneur Award by the AATCC, American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, the world’s leading not-for-profit association serving textile professionals. Stony Creek was a Martha Stewart American Made Awardee in 2016 and the Tennessee feature for Fast Company Magazine’s United States of Innovation in 2017. Sarah was named an Inc Magazine Top 100 Female Founder in 2018.
Joseph Kadi, Stony Creek Colors’ Chief Operating Officer, is an accomplished and seasoned executive with diverse experiences in multi-sites global manufacturing, business and operations management in the Animal & Human Ingredients and Nutrition space including Nutraceuticals and flavors. He brings a wealth of expertise in areas such as engineering, supply chain, operational excellence initiatives development and implementations and processes optimization, in addition to a range of administrative, strategic and financial functions. In his early part of his career, Joseph designed, constructed, installed and started-up three manufacturing plants from green fields in the USA and Europe. Throughout his career, he progressively held high profile senior executive positions with private and publicly traded companies, most recently as GM with Triple T Foods, where he was instrumental in building a high performance management team, business systems infrastructure and maximizing the value of the business which led to a successful sale of the company; currently owned by the J.M. Smucker Company.
Joseph obtained his Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. He holds an MBA degree from John E. Simon School of Business of the Maryville University in St. Louis, MO.
Mark Cooley, currently serves as Vice President of Administration and Human Resources. His areas of responsibility are finance and administrative operations. Prior to joining Stony Creek Colors in 2014, Mark worked across the natural foods manufacturing industry. Most recently (1999 through 2011) he was an owner and vice president of Elena’s Foods, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of frozen Mexican foods where he was responsible for sales and marketing as well as finance administration. During 2010, Mark and his partners sold the company to a Mumbai, India-based food manufacturing company. He is a graduate of University of California at San Diego with a BA in Chinese Studies. He also holds an MBA from Santa Clara University.
