Fred Aker


Glass Furnace Industry Sales Leader  ·  40 Years  ·  Nikolaus Sorg · PaneraTech  ·  Bilingual EN / DE  ·  Lohr, Germany

Thirty-four years at Nikolaus Sorg GmbH in Lohr am Main — one of the world's leading glass furnace engineering companies — starting in IT and finishing as Sales Director West, running one of the company's two global sales teams.

From 2019 to 2026 I served as Vice President Sales & Marketing at PaneraTech, Inc., where I took the SmartMelter radar-based refractory monitoring system from market introduction to commercial deployment across 40+ countries, with key accounts including Gallo Glass, AB InBev, O-I, and FEVISA.

My work has always been on the hot end of the glass industry — furnace design, refractory systems, large capital project sales — in container, float, and specialty glass, across markets in Europe, the Americas, Russia, and the Middle East.

Glass furnace technology is a small world; the buyers are technically sophisticated and they remember who gave them a straight answer. I have an MBA from Heriot-Watt University and hold dual U.S.-German citizenship.

Currently available for senior business development roles in glass technology, capital equipment, or adjacent industrial sectors. I have worked with generative AI since 2023 and have built a multi-agent AI research system for competitive intelligence and commercial analysis across the glass industry. I am looking for a team that wants both the domain knowledge and the working AI methodology.

"The buyers know the product better than most salespeople do. That dynamic suits me well."
  • Glass furnace engineering
  • Refractory systems
  • SmartMelter / radar monitoring
  • Large capital project sales
  • International B2B sales
  • Key account management
  • Negotiation
  • Agentic & generative AI
  • P&L management
  • Container glass
  • Float glass
  • Specialty glass
  • Furnace health management
  • AZS refractories