When Lucas Piccinin looked at online grocery stores in Brazil, he didn’t just see carts and checkouts, he saw waste, opacity, and a chance to turn both into value and dignity. As Founder and CEO of NetConv Shop, he has built a system that brings “transparency on freshness to e-commerce operations,” pairing real-time shelf life with dynamic pricing so items approaching expiration are discounted before they become waste. “We reduce the prices of products as they are closer to expiration, turning potential food waste into revenue,” he explains. That same logic inspired the HUNGER PASS, which directs discounted, near-expiry items to communities chosen by supermarkets: “People in need could access this discounted category of products, allowing a safety net for hunger around the globe.”
Piccinin’s path to this idea began long before NetConv Shop’s formal launch. “I always wanted to sell groceries online,” he says, recalling his earliest experiments in Cuiabá in 2015. A year later, he and partner Fabian, now the company’s lead software engineer, pinpointed a bigger structural gap: a “lack of transparency on freshness” in online retail. Their response was pragmatic and technical at once: build a pricing engine that automatically adjusts as products near expiry. “That marked the beginning of NetConv Shop,” Piccinin notes.
The entrepreneurial instinct was seeded years earlier. After graduating in Business Administration from EAESP–FGV in 2006, he sketched NetConv’s first steps by listing supermarket items and surveying neighbors on what they’d actually want delivered. The dream paused and rerouted through formative stints in banking, law school, and even a family-business turnaround, lessons in numbers, risk, and resilience that would later power NetConv’s operating discipline. “It became a reality only in 2015 when I met Fabian,” he says of finally aligning vision with the right technical partnership.
What animates Piccinin is the math beneath the mission. “What fascinated me the most was the calculations and registrations and how all those numbers were managed,” he says, recalling the mid-2000s when “there were no good deliveries for supermarkets in Brazil,” and the gap was wide open. Today, his long-term aim is equally numerical and human: “to keep exploring the connection between supply and demand to combat waste and hunger.”
His leadership style mirrors that blend of rigor and empathy. “We empower collaborators and listen to them on building new concepts,” Piccinin says. When experiments fail, blame is off the table; learning is not. “We adjust and keep the morale high for our long run goal.” The team iterates constantly, “a lot of testing for trying new ways of doing more with less,” and even treats customer complaints as a resource, “to refine the process into a better way of doing.” The approach, he adds, has worked “in spite of the many failures,” and has proved “very effective in driving growth.”
He is candid about strengths and blind spots. “I’m courageous to take bold risks,” he says. Coding, however, is not his arena, “my weakness is in coding,” a gap covered by Fabian’s stewardship of the engineering function. That self-awareness shapes how he balances work and life, too. “I try to identify the key areas I would regret not acting on, and create a process where it could fit all those elements,” he says. When it’s time to reset, the routine is simple: “I listen to music and go to the gym.” I used to go to the gym every day, except on Sundays. Restaurants would be less frequent.
Recognition has followed the results. NetConv Shop is a GS1 Solution Partner, and Piccinin has been named an “Iconic Visionary in the Global Retail Industry to watch in 2025” by The Enterprise World, as well as “Brazil’s Top Most Trailblazing Ecommerce Voice to Follow” by The Visionary Spark. Recent honors also include the Global Excellence & Leadership Awards (Dubai, 2026) and the Business Frontier Leadership Conclave and Awards (Dubai, 2026).
If there’s a single piece of advice he offers future founders, it’s to begin with reality, not a pitch deck. “Identify the problem you want to solve and use creativity to develop a solution,” he says. And if the problem isn’t obvious yet? Start anyway. “Just start doing it and keep your eyes and ears widely open to perceive when you face an opportunity disguised as a problem.”
From algorithmic pricing to the HUNGER PASS, Lucas Piccinin’s work shows how small operational truths, dates, discounts, and demand, can add up to a larger social outcome. It’s commerce that counts twice: once on the balance sheet, and again at the dinner table.
