Key takeaways:
- CEO turnover across Big Food is accelerating as boards respond more quickly to slowing volume growth and fading pricing power.
- Leadership changes are increasingly tied to deeper structural issues, including portfolio reshaping, weaker demand and rising competition from private label and healthier alternatives.
- The industry’s long-reliable growth model is under strain, forcing new CEOs to rethink how and where sustainable growth can be delivered.
Something’s going on in the corner office, and it’s not just the usual round of retirements and tidy handovers. Over the past year, a string of leadership moves, exits and boardroom tensions has surfaced across the biggest food groups.
Among the 50 largest consumer product companies, around 15 changed CEOs in 2025 – roughly 30%, well above broader market levels, and a sign that boards are acting faster and with less patience. What’s also changed is who they’re turning to. Around a third of new CEOs last year were hired from outside, often with turnaround experience.
Not all of it comes down to performance. Some of the most high-profile exits have been tied to governance and conduct. Step back from the individual cases, though, and a broader shift starts to come into view. Growth is getting harder to sustain, and the cracks are starting to show.
Pricing has carried this industry for the best part of two years, but it was always going to run out of road eventually. Volumes aren’t keeping pace in several core categories, and in some markets, they’ve slipped. It’s not dramatic, just persistent, and it’s showing up at the same time boards are making decisions about leadership.
Boardroom pressure is starting to show
Nestlé doesn’t usually air its issues in public, so September 2025 stood out. Laurent Freixe was dismissed after an internal investigation found he had breached company policy by failing to disclose a relationship with a subordinate. The company pointed to governance and its code of conduct, underlining how seriously it treats leadership standards.
Philipp Navratil – a company veteran who joined Nestlé as an auditor in 2001 and most recently led Nespresso – stepped in immediately. Within weeks, Paul Bulcke confirmed he would leave the chair earlier than planned, with Pablo Isla brought forward. You can treat those as separate events if you want, but it’s a lot happening all at once.
In announcing the change, Bulcke described the decision as “necessary,” adding that Nestlé’s values and governance “are strong foundations of our company,” while backing Navratil’s “track record of achieving results in challenging environments” and signalling there would be no shift in strategy or pace.
All of that landed while Nestlé was already dealing with softer demand in parts of Europe after a long stretch of price increases across confectionery and coffee. Investors had started asking how much further that lever could be pushed. Then, of course, there was the infant formula crisis in the US, which drew political heat and raised uncomfortable questions about supply chain resilience.
Unilever’s shift came earlier in the year, with Hein Schumacher out by 31 May and CFO Fernando Fernandez stepping in. The move was framed as a mutual agreement, but it followed a period of patchy growth, a strategy that hadn’t quite landed and mounting investor pressure, including an activist presence on the board.
In announcing the change, chair Ian Meakins said the board was “very confident” in Fernandez’s ability to lead a high-performing management team, realise the benefits of the group’s turnaround plan “with urgency” and deliver the shareholder value the company’s potential demands.
Since then, the direction has only become clearer. The company has moved into advanced discussions to separate or merge its food business as part of a broader pivot towards higher-growth categories like beauty and personal care. Whether that results in a full exit or a more selective carve-out, the signal is hard to miss: parts of Big Food portfolios are being questioned in a way they weren’t a few years ago.
Kraft Heinz followed with its own reset in December, bringing in Steve Cahillane from Kellanova to take over from Carlos Abrams-Rivera from January 2026. The appointment came alongside plans to split the business, but those were put on hold just weeks later as Cahillane prioritised stabilising performance after a period of weaker demand, pricing backlash and lost share to cheaper and healthier alternatives.
“The company’s decision to postpone separation plans and instead accelerate reinvestment reveals deeper problems than previously acknowledged,” Deutsche Bank analyst Steve Powers told Reuters.
Kraft Heinz had already reported fourth-quarter results below expectations and flagged weaker earnings for 2026. Cahillane has since moved to increase investment, with R&D spending set to rise by around 20% year-on-year, alongside a renewed focus on product innovation, nutrition and value.
He has also acknowledged that recent price increases didn’t deliver enough value for consumers, and in some cases pushed them towards cheaper or healthier alternatives. “We busted through four or five levels of price points in a very accelerated fashion and the consumer was left very disappointed in that,” Cahillane said on a post-earnings call.
Then Conagra Brands, mid-April this year, with Sean Connolly stepping down after more than a decade and John Brase arriving from Smucker on 1 June. The Chicago-based group had been dealing with weaker demand in supermarket staples and a share price that had been heading in the wrong direction for a while. The CEO change came less than a month after the company lowered its annual profit forecast, citing increased uncertainty tied to global trade tensions.
“Conagra remains in a tight position fundamentally … Conagra faces a difficult balancing act between financial repair and reinvestment, leaving the overall setup challenging in the near to intermediate term,” Jefferies analyst Scott Marks told Reuters.
None of these stories are identical: one involves a conduct issue; another an activist investor; another a structural rethink. But they’re all tied, in one way or another, to performance that isn’t quite where it needs to be. That’s when it starts to look less like churn and more like a pattern.
The pressure isn’t coming from one place
Take a step back and look at the categories themselves. Cereals have been sluggish for years, particularly in North America, where private label has quietly got better and breakfast has become less of a fixed routine. The Kellogg split back in October 2023 looks, with hindsight, less like a bold strategic move and more like an early admission that one part of the business wasn’t going to keep up.
Snacks have been the safer bet, but even there the tone is changing. Companies are leaning more on promotions again and value packs are back in a way they weren’t a year or two ago. That doesn’t happen if everything is ticking along nicely.
Confectionery and sweet bakery still sell, but the policy backdrop is tightening. Sugar, portion sizes, labelling – none of that is easing off, particularly in Europe. It doesn’t kill demand, but it does complicate it.
Dairy sits somewhere in the middle. Steady, but not exactly exciting. And increasingly exposed to private label that’s good enough for most shoppers.
Put all of that together and the question boards are asking becomes fairly obvious. If price isn’t going to do the heavy lifting anymore, what fills the gap?
What’s different this time is how quickly they’re acting on that question. In previous cycles, leadership teams might have been given more time to work through softer patches. Over the past 12 months, that patience looks thinner.
Which brings it back to the original point. This isn’t really a story about CEOs, but about an industry where the old growth model is starting to crack – and it doesn’t feel finished yet.
The corner office shake-up is the visible part; the harder bit is what sits underneath it. A market where demand is less predictable, pricing power is weaker, and the usual playbook doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.
The next round of CEOs doesn’t just have to run these businesses; they have to work out how they grow again. And that’s a more complicated job than it was even a couple of years ago.