Samantha Skyring: Founder Oryx Desert Salt

Ethical business keynote speaker Samantha Skyring helps leaders build regenerative, profitable brands through courageous decision making, values led leadership, and supply chains rooted in trust.

Samantha Skyring - Image 01 (February 3, 2026)

Quick Facts:

  • Highlights:
    • Founder and CEO of Oryx Desert Salt
    • Built a global food brand after personally funding launch by selling her home
    • Stocked by major retailers including Woolworths and Pick n Pay
    • Served in more than 3,500 restaurants worldwide
  • Formats: Keynote speaker, ethical food entrepreneur, and founder mentor
  • Audience: Founders, business leaders, retailers, food industry professionals, and organizations focused on sustainability and trust
  • Outcomes:
    1. Clear understanding of how to build ethical and profitable businesses
    2. Practical insight into courageous leadership and risk taking
    3. Real world examples of regenerative supply chains at scale
Reading time: 2 min
Reviews: (0 reviews)
  • Travels from: Cape Town

Talent Services

Keynote Topics:

1. Courage Over Certainty: Leading When There Is No Safety Net

What it really takes to make high stakes decisions when data is incomplete, fear is present, and conviction is all you have. Lessons from selling everything to build something meaningful.

Best for: Founders, executives, leadership teams, entrepreneurs

2. Ethical, Regenerative, Profitable: Why Business Does Not Have to Choose

How to design companies that protect people and planet while still scaling commercially. A practical look at making ethics operational, not aspirational.

Best for: Sustainability leaders, boards, ESG focused organizations, corporates

3. Trust Is the New Currency: Building Brands People Believe In

Why trust now outweighs marketing spend, and how transparency, testing, and values led decisions create lasting customer loyalty.

Best for: Retail, FMCG, marketing, brand and innovation teams

4. From Ingredient to Impact: Rethinking Supply Chains from the Ground Up

Using salt as a case study, Samantha reveals what hidden systems exist inside everyday products and how leaders can redesign supply chains for integrity and resilience.

Best for: Food industry, procurement, operations, sustainability teams

5. Fear, Risk, and Responsibility: The Emotional Reality of Leadership

An honest exploration of fear as a leadership companion, not a weakness, and how to make clear decisions under pressure without burning out or compromising values.

Best for: Senior leaders, founders, women in leadership, fast growth companies

Talent Short Bio

Samantha Skyring is the founder and CEO of Oryx Desert Salt, an ethical food company redefining how people and businesses think about one of the world’s most essential ingredients. Her work challenges the dominance of processed, polluted salts by offering clean, mineral rich desert salt sourced with integrity and transparency.

Samantha’s entrepreneurial journey is defined by conviction and risk. To launch Oryx Desert Salt, she sold her home and invested everything into 34 tonnes of desert salt with no guarantee of success. That leap of faith shaped her leadership philosophy and now informs her work mentoring founders and purpose driven leaders navigating uncertainty.

Under her leadership, Oryx has scaled globally while staying deeply values led. The brand supplies retailers, chefs, food producers, and wellness practitioners with trusted salt solutions, from refill systems with ceramic grinders to bulk supply at commercial scale. Samantha believes business can be ethical, regenerative, and profitable at the same time, and her talks demonstrate what it takes to make that belief operational.

Samantha Skyring is the founder and CEO of Oryx Desert Salt, a purpose driven food company challenging the global salt industry by replacing processed, polluted salts with clean, mineral rich desert salt people can trust. Her work sits at the intersection of ethical sourcing, regenerative business, and courageous leadership.

Samantha Skyring’s journey into entrepreneurship was not driven by trend or convenience, but by conviction. While researching everyday food ingredients, Samantha Skyring uncovered widespread issues within the salt industry, including excessive processing, contamination, and the erosion of natural mineral profiles. Determined to offer a better alternative, she made a defining decision early in Oryx’s life cycle: she sold her home to personally fund the purchase of 34 tonnes of desert salt, without any guarantee it would sell. That leap of faith became the foundation of how she leads and why her story resonates so deeply with founders and executives navigating uncertainty.

Under Samantha’s leadership, Oryx Desert Salt has grown into a globally trusted brand while remaining uncompromising on ethics and quality. The company supplies retailers, chefs, food producers, and wellness practitioners through retail packs, refill systems with ceramic grinders, bulk orders up to one tonne, and practitioner education and training. Oryx is stocked by major South African retailers including Woolworths and Pick n Pay, served in more than 3,500 restaurants, available in Whole Foods Market in the United States, and supplied to JetBlue Airlines at a volume of 150,000 sachets per month.

Sustainability is not a marketing layer for Samantha Skyring; it is operational reality. Oryx Desert Salt is certified microplastic free, lab tested for purity, and designed around refill systems that significantly reduce waste. In 2024 alone, the company prevented more than 894,500 plastic grinders from entering landfill, saving over twelve shipping containers of plastic waste. These outcomes reflect Samantha’s belief that environmental responsibility and commercial success are not opposing forces, but mutually reinforcing ones.

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