FMCG's corner office turns into a revolving door for CEOs

Thirteen Months of Change at the Top

• May 2021: Sudhir Sitapati, a 22-year HUL veteran, is named MD & CEO of Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL).
• 2023: Rohit Jawa takes over as CEO & MD of Hindustan Unilever; Hein Schumacher becomes global CEO of Unilever.
• October 2024: Nestlé India announces a succession plan — Manish Tiwary, then Amazon India's country head, will succeed long-serving Chairman & MD Suresh Narayanan.
• July 10–11, 2025: HUL announces Rohit Jawa will step down after barely two years — the shortest CEO tenure in HUL's history. Priya Nair is named CEO & MD effective August 1, becoming HUL's first woman chief executive in 92 years.
• July 31, 2025: Suresh Narayanan retires from Nestlé India after a decade at the helm, remembered for reviving Maggi after the 2015 crisis. Manish Tiwary takes over as Chairman & MD from August 1.
• September 1, 2025: Nestlé's global CEO Laurent Freixe is fired with immediate effect after an internal probe finds an undisclosed relationship with a subordinate. Nespresso chief Philipp Navratil is named CEO the same day — Nestlé's second global CEO change inside two years.
• November 10, 2025: Britannia Industries' Vice-Chairman, MD & CEO Varun Berry resigns after 13 years; the stock falls nearly 7 per cent. CFO N. Venkataraman holds interim charge.
• December 15, 2025: Rakshit Hargave, formerly CEO of Aditya Birla Group's Birla Opus paints business, joins Britannia as MD & CEO.
• January–February 2026: Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting's Vineet Agrawal retires after a four-decade career; Kumar Chander takes over as CEO from February 1. The same week, Avenue Supermarts (DMart) sees Anshul Asawa succeed Ignatius Noronha as CEO.
• February 17, 2026: Dabur India elevates Mohit Malhotra, CEO since 2019, to the newly created role of Global CEO. Herjit S. Bhalla, a Hershey veteran, is named CEO – India Business, effective mid-April.
• August 11–12, 2026: Sudhir Sitapati resigns from Godrej Consumer Products — days after shareholders approved a fresh five-year term for him. GCPL's CFO Aasif Malbari is named MD & CEO the same day; the stock falls nearly 10 per cent on the surprise.
• August 21, 2026: Colgate-Palmolive India's Prabha Narasimhan, four years into the role, is elevated to EVP–Marketing for the Asia-Pacific region. Manish Anandani, returning after eight years at Kenvue, is named MD & CEO effective September 28.

A Sector That Doesn't Usually Do This

FMCG chief executives are not supposed to be interchangeable. It is a business built on decades-long brand stewardship, distribution relationships nurtured over a working lifetime, and institutional memory that cannot be onboarded in a quarter. Suresh Narayanan spent 26 years at Nestlé before becoming its India chief. Varun Berry gave Britannia 13 years. Vineet Agrawal gave Wipro Consumer four decades. This was, by design, an industry where leadership tenures were measured in years, not quarters.

That pattern has broken. Between July 2025 and August 2026, Hindustan Unilever, Nestlé India, Nestlé's global parent, Britannia Industries, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting, Avenue Supermarts, Dabur India, Godrej Consumer Products and Colgate-Palmolive India have all changed their chief executive. Rohit Jawa's HUL tenure was the shortest in the company's 92-year history. Sudhir Sitapati resigned from Godrej Consumer days after shareholders approved him for another five years. Nestlé fired a CEO after just twelve months in the corner office — its second leadership change in under two years.

Search and leadership advisory firms tracking the sector describe this as more than a coincidence of retirements. “Post-pandemic, FMCG and consumer durables companies have faced margin pressure, intensifying competition, and slower volume-led growth,” Siddharth Verma, Head of Xpheno Executive Search, has noted, adding that boards are increasingly reassessing whether their existing leadership is equipped for the next phase. The question worth asking is not just who is leaving and who is arriving — but what is actually breaking inside India's consumption engine that is forcing boards to make these calls.

Reason One: Growth Has Genuinely, Structurally Slowed

The most straightforward explanation is also the least glamorous: FMCG growth in India has been inconsistent for several years, and boards have stopped being willing to wait it out. Kantar data has shown overall FMCG volume growth dipping to a five-quarter low even as companies raised prices to protect margins against input cost inflation. Urban consumption growth cooled sharply — from over 4 per cent to closer to 2.5–3 per cent in several recent quarters — even as rural markets, a larger share of FMCG sales, have oscillated between recovery and renewed softness depending on the monsoon and food inflation.

HUL's own numbers illustrate the point starkly. During Rohit Jawa's tenure, volumes grew just around 2 per cent a year, well below the double-digit growth the company had trained investors to expect, while operating margins slipped from roughly 24 per cent to 23.5 per cent. The company's share price, among the best performers of the previous decade, registered effectively no growth over his term. Nestlé India, similarly, posted a 5.2 per cent year-on-year decline in net profit in its final quarter under Suresh Narayanan, with edible oil, coffee and palm oil inflation eating into margins even as revenue ticked up modestly.

Boards are now prioritising immediate delivery over long-term strategies, making leadership tenure dependent on quick wins.  — Industry analysis on 2025's FMCG CEO churn

This is the backdrop against which nearly every recent CEO change has to be read. It is rarely one bad quarter that costs an FMCG chief executive their job — Sitapati's Godrej Consumer had, in fact, just reported a relatively strong Q1 FY27 before his exit. It is the accumulated weight of multiple quarters of underwhelming volume growth against public shareholder expectations built during FMCG's higher-growth years.

Reason Two: Quick Commerce Broke the Distribution Playbook Every FMCG Leader Was Trained On

For decades, the core competency of an FMCG chief executive in India was building and defending a distribution network — the 12 to 13 million kirana stores that still account for roughly two-thirds to 80 per cent of FMCG sales nationally. That skill set is being tested by a genuinely new distribution model. India's quick commerce market — Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and BB Now — has grown from roughly Rs 5,000 crore in 2021 to well over Rs 40,000–50,000 crore in gross merchandise value by 2026, and now accounts for a large majority of online FMCG sales in metro India.

The disruption is not just about where consumers shop; it changes the underlying economics for everyone in the chain before them. According to industry analysis, close to 80 per cent of quick commerce funding has gone toward customer acquisition and discounting rather than infrastructure — meaning the price gap consumers see between an app and their neighbourhood kirana is often subsidised, not efficient. Traditional distributors serving the same high-frequency categories — beverages, snacks, personal care — have reported volume losses of 10–25 per cent in metro markets, even as fixed costs and credit cycles stayed the same or worsened. By mid-2025, several of India's largest FMCG names — ITC, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Tata Consumer, Dabur, Reliance and Parle among them — were reported to be actively re-engaging general trade after a year of leaning hard into quick commerce partnerships, following distributor backlash over pricing disparities.

For an incoming FMCG chief executive, this means the job itself has changed. It is no longer sufficient to defend a general trade network built over decades; it now requires running two structurally different go-to-market models simultaneously, with different margin structures, different data requirements and different consumer behaviour patterns, often within the same city block. Boards appear to be betting that a new generation of leaders — several with backgrounds in e-commerce, digital-first retail, or FMCG marketing rather than pure sales and distribution — are better placed to navigate that shift. It is not incidental that Nestlé India's new chief, Manish Tiwary, came from Amazon India, or that at least six of the ten most recent incoming FMCG chiefs across the sector have marketing leadership in their backgrounds, according to sector tracking by trade publication BestMediaInfo.

Reason Three: Investor Patience Has Run Out, and Boards Know It

Layered on top of genuine operational pressure is a harder-edged shift in how boards and institutional investors treat underperformance. “The message from FMCG boardrooms... is unequivocal: deliver results promptly, or face leadership changes,” one market analysis of the 2025 churn noted, pointing to a decline in investor tolerance for multi-year strategic execution timelines that used to be standard in the sector.

The market's reaction to several of these exits has made the stakes explicit rather than implicit. Godrej Consumer Products fell nearly 10 per cent the day after Sitapati's resignation was announced — even with an internal successor named in the same regulatory filing, with no search period and no gap in leadership. Britannia shares fell close to 7 per cent on the news of Varun Berry's exit. These are not muted, orderly transitions; they are events the market treats as material enough to reprice a stock overnight, which in turn raises the cost, for any sitting FMCG CEO, of being seen to underdeliver for too long.

Godrej Consumer's own Executive Chairperson, Nisaba Godrej, made the boardroom's expectations unusually explicit in her remarks to investors after Sitapati's exit — speaking of the need for greater “candour, urgency and operational delivery” from the company's next chief executive, even while praising Sitapati's tenure. It was a rare public window into what India Inc. boards are now demanding from FMCG leadership: not just a growth story, but visible, fast-moving proof of execution.

Reason Four: A Genuine Governance Reckoning, Not Just a Growth Story

Not every exit in this cycle is about numbers. Nestlé's global leadership crisis is a governance story in its own right, and one that FMCG boards everywhere are watching closely. Laurent Freixe, appointed CEO in September 2023, was dismissed with immediate effect in September 2025 after an internal investigation — triggered by a tip through Nestlé's own whistle-blower hotline — found he had concealed a romantic relationship with a direct subordinate, a clear breach of the company's Code of Business Conduct. He was Nestlé's second CEO exit inside a year; his predecessor, Ulf Mark Schneider, had stepped down over underperformance concerns. “The loss of two CEOs and a chairman in a year is of historic proportions for Nestlé,” Ingo Speich, head of corporate governance at Deka, a top-30 Nestlé investor, said at the time.

The episode is a reminder that the current wave of FMCG leadership change is not a single story with a single cause. Boards are simultaneously tightening operational accountability, testing new go-to-market instincts in incoming leaders, and — in at least one marquee global case — enforcing conduct standards with a speed and severity that would have been unthinkable in a sector once known for its caution and continuity.

Reason Five: The Sector Itself Is Losing Some of Its Best People to Fatigue

A less-discussed thread running through 2025 and 2026 is what search consultants describe as fatigue among senior FMCG lifers — a sense, among leaders who have spent twenty-plus years inside the same handful of companies, that the sector's mature, incremental growth curve no longer offers the scale of challenge or reward available elsewhere. Storyboard18's year-end review of the churn describes 2025 as reflecting “fatigue within mature industries, evolving opportunity equations, and a growing appetite among seasoned leaders to apply their playbooks beyond FMCG,” with several marquee executives moving into board roles, private equity, or leadership positions in faster-growing adjacent sectors altogether.

This cuts both ways for the boards involved. On one hand, it thins the internal succession bench of leaders steeped in FMCG-specific distribution and brand-building discipline. On the other, it is opening the door — visibly, in appointment after appointment — to executives from e-commerce, global consumer goods, and even categories like paints and confectionery, who bring a different instinct for the digital-first, quick-commerce-inflected consumer landscape that India's FMCG sector now has to operate in.

What the Pattern Actually Signals

Put together, the timeline is not simply a coincidence of retirements clustering in one unusual year. It is the visible surface of a sector recalibrating for a fundamentally different next decade — one where double-digit volume growth can no longer be assumed, where two parallel distribution economies have to be run at once, where boards have far less patience for multi-year turnarounds, and where governance failures are being punished immediately and publicly rather than managed quietly.

The near-uniform profile of the incoming class of CEOs is itself instructive. Marketing-led backgrounds, e-commerce exposure, and — in Aasif Malbari's and several other cases — a finance lens on operational discipline are now more common qualifications for the corner office than the sales-and-distribution pedigree that defined FMCG leadership for a generation. Whether this new generation of leaders can restore the growth rates that made Indian FMCG one of the most reliable investment stories of the last two decades — or whether the slowdown itself reflects a more permanent shift in how urban and rural India shop — is the question the sector's boardrooms, and its investors, will be watching most closely over the next few quarters.

The table below captures each confirmed CEO-level exit and appointment across major Indian FMCG and consumer companies during the period under review, along with the stated or reported reason for the change.

This article first appeared in BWPeople.