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Nestlé moves to 'leaner' board as new CEO reshuffles team

18-Oct-2024 - Last updated on 18-Oct-2024 at 10:46 GMT

Nestlé is a global food business headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland. Credit: Nestlé

Food giant Nestlé has announced a series of changes to its executive board, in addition to publishing its Q3 financial results.

New CEO Laurent Freixe, who took up the role on 1 September 2024, said that “leaner executive board structure” would increase simplicity and speed up decision making.

The changes, which will come into force on 1 January 2025, include merging Zone Latin America and Zone North America to create Zone Americas (AMS) and incorporating Zone Greater China Region into Zone Asia, Oceania and Africa (AOA), which will operate under the leadership of Remy Ejel.

Nespresso boss Philipp Navratil will join the executive board and report directly to Freixe, while David Rennie will step us as Head of Strategic Business Units (SBUs), in addition to marketing and sales.

Rennie is replacing Bernard Meunier, who will step down from the executive board on 31 March 2025.

Sustainability Unity Antonia Wanner lead will also now report directly to Freixe.

Zone Europe will continue to be led by Guillaume Le Cunff and remains unchanged.

"With these organizational changes, all the leaders of key units driving our performance and our transformation will now report directly to me,” Freixe commented.

“This is crucial, as we sharpen our focus on consumers and customers and restore investment in our brands and in innovation to expand market share and accelerate our performance.

He added that Nestlé will place “greater emphasis” on its digital transformation moving forward as it looks to evolve into a “real-time, end-to-end connected, data- and AI-powered organization”.

Q3 results

For the first nine months of 2024 Nestlé reported organic sales growth of 2% at group level, with Zone Europe delivering a 3.3% increase.

However, reported sales growth declined by 2.4% group wide, with Freixe citing weakened consumer demand.

For the full-year, Nestlé has also updated its organic sales growth guidance to around 2%.

“We delivered organic sales growth, driven by positive real internal growth,” Freixe said.

“Consumer demand has weakened in recent months, and we expect the demand environment to remain soft. Given this outlook and our further actions to reduce customer inventories in the fourth quarter, we have updated our full-year guidance.”

In other news, Sainsbury’s and Aldi have both recalled products in the past week due to allergen labelling errors.