Big Food leadership shake-ups – summary
- CEO exits across Big Food have accelerated amid scandals and performance pressure
- Boards are increasingly impatient as post-COVID growth fades and costs rise
- COVID-era pricing masked innovation gaps now exposed by private-label competition
- Companies are hiring operators and turnaround leaders rather than brand builders
- Big Food faces strategic risk if leadership churn undermines long-term innovation
What’s happening at the top of Big Food?
That’s one of the questions we’re heard most often over the last twelve months.
Why?
Because C-suite exits have dominated the headlines, and they keep on coming.
Big Food big exits
From Coca-Cola to Kraft Heinz, CEO exits have been happening right across the industry.
And, while some of them were simply the right time for the individual to step-down – Michele Buck at Hershey and James Quincey at Coca-Cola – others have been marred by controversy, forcing a change.
First, we have the much-talked-about sacking of Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe, who was forced out after just twelve months in the job due to an, “undisclosed romantic relationship with a direct subordinate”.
And Freixe’s actions didn’t just lead to his demise, he took Nestlé chairman Paul Bulcke down with him, as the latter was forced out by Nestlé investors who held him partially responsible for the incident.
Then, just three days after Freixe’s exit, drinks giant Suntory’s CEO, Takeshi Niinami, was ousted over allegations of drug use.
This was followed by the abrupt exit of Kroger’s CEO, Rodney McMullen. This one remains shrouded in mystery, with the company saying only that an investigation found McMullen’s personal conduct to be “inconsistent” with the company’s ethics policies.
Kraft Heinz CEO, Carlos Abrams-Rivera, also stepped down, a move which came just weeks after the American food giant announced plans to split into two separate entities – it’s hard to imagine these two decisions weren’t connected. Did Abrams-Rivera disagree with the separation, or was he not deemed capable of leading the business through it?
There are also question marks surrounding Hein Schumacher’s exit from Unilever after just 18 months in post. The only clue behind the exit being chairman Ian Meakins’ words that there is much further to go in delivering best-in-class results, implying Schumacher wasn’t hitting the mark – though this would purely be a results-based issue, rather than anything more problematic. This didn’t seem to phase the world’s biggest chocolate maker, Barry Callebaut, though as the Swiss-Belgian multinational swiftly appointed him as CEO.
And speaking of Barry Callebaut... Hein Schumacher’s predecessor, Peter Feld, also left under strange circumstances.
The German CEO stepped down back in January, and all seemed cordial between the two parties, with chairman Patrick De Maeseneire thanking Feld for “his immense work and leadership” and wishing him “all the best for the future.”
However the truth, as it has a tendency to do, soon emerged, with sources revealing strategy disagreements at the highest level were the real reason behind the unexpected exit.
Finally (for now) we have the exit of Hershey’s US president, Andrew Archambault’s – another to come just 12 months after appointment. And again, few details for the move have been given, only that Archambault has decided to “pursue another opportunity”.
So, scandals aside, why are so many C-suite execs leaving their post?
What’s failing at the top of Big Food
“It really depends on the category,” says Agne Rackauskaite, portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management. “For some categories, it’s a structural reset. But for a lot of other categories, this is a performance problem.”
In other words, many CEOs have failed to deliver at the highest level and have therefore been swiftly replaced.
But why are the number of exits escalating now?
Well, the problem might not be failing CEOs at all. It might actually be a failing system, and it dates back to 2020.
Rackauskaite believes Big Food had a relatively easy time of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, but circumstances are tougher now, leading to closer scrutiny on leadership.
“The reality is that Big Food overperformed during COVID,” she explains. “Their smaller local and regional competitors, and private label manufacturers, didn’t have robust enough supply chains to keep product on the shelves. So what Big Food did was cut SKUs, prioritise their most popular products, and they benefited massively from consumers stuck at home, not eating out.”
This all changed in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, spiking input and freight costs.
Major manufacturers, says Rackauskaite, pushed through significant pricing to offset this, and the consumer absorbed it because “they were still flush with post-COVID savings, so the usual elasticities didn’t show up the way the models predicted”.
This was read as a signal that consumers were “in love with their brands again”.
Fast forward to 2026 and smaller competitors have rebuilt their supply chains, private label is back, the consumer is genuinely exhausted on price, following years of inflation, and Big Food has seen multiple years of volume declines because they essentially “forgot how to innovate”.
“They were living off those COVID highs,” says Rackauskaite.
Now, she explains, the structurally challenged categories need a “proper reset – portfolio reshaping, divestments, etc." For everything else, it’s more of a performance issue that can be addressed with meaningful innovation and more competitive pricing.
Do CEOs need more time?
Boards are, “becoming less patient,” says Rackauskaite. “The consumer sector has become the shortest CEO tenure sector in the last few years.”
By some estimates, average CEO tenure in consumer-facing sectors has dropped to four to five years, versus closer to a decade historically.
That growing impatience reflects a broader shift in expectations, with sluggish growth, margin pressures, and rapidly changing consumer habits, boards are under pressure to show decisive action quickly. Replacing the CEO can appear to be the most visible way to signal accountability and change.
And it’s not just boards driving this change. Activist investors and increasingly vocal shareholders are pushing for faster strategic change – whether that’s break-ups, cost-cutting, or portfolio reshaping – leaving boards with less room to wait and see.
But the question is whether this shortened runway is actually counterproductive. In many cases, the challenges CPG companies face – whether it’s portfolio repositioning, rebuilding brand equity, or executing innovation pipelines – are inherently long-term in nature. These are not quick fixes, and frequent leadership turnover can disrupt strategy just as it begins to take hold.
A new CEO often needs time to diagnose issues, align the organisation, and implement changes before results become visible.
On the other hand, there’s a valid argument for faster intervention when performance is clearly off track. In a highly competitive and fast-moving sector, boards may feel they simply cannot afford to wait several years for a turnaround that may never materialise.
Who is Big Food hiring now?
With so many CEOs being replaced, attentions are turning to the types of people bagging the top jobs – spoiler alert: they’re rarely ever women, with female representation at CEO level in global CPG still lagging significantly behind other sectors.
“It’s probably too early to call a clear pattern,” says Rackauskaite. “But the recent hires have leaned more towards operators and turnaround backgrounds than brand builders.”
Whether that’s the right profile for what these businesses actually need, she says, is a very different question, and it’s one that will be answered over time through success or failure.
So what does all this mean for Big Food?
What’s next for Big Food?
In the near term, the churn at the top looks set to continue. With performance under pressure and investors demanding clearer returns, boards are unlikely to suddenly become more patient. If anything, expectations will keep rising, and CEOs will be judged faster and more harshly on their ability to deliver tangible results.
But constant change carries its own risks. If companies keep resetting leadership before strategies have time to bed in, they risk lurching from one plan to the next without ever fully executing any of them. The danger is that Big Food mistakes motion for progress.
Longer term, the real test will be whether these leadership changes actually fix the underlying issues. Bringing in operators and turnaround specialists may help stabilise performance and sharpen execution. But for many companies, the challenge is not just operational, it’s about rediscovering relevance with consumers who have more choice, less loyalty, and tighter budgets than ever before.
That means innovation, brand clarity, and genuine value are likely to matter just as much as cost discipline.
In that sense, this wave of exits isn’t just a story about individuals at the top. It’s a sign that Big Food itself is in transition, and still working out what kind of leadership it really needs for the next phase.
