The changing face of FMCG leadership: Inside India’s latest CEO reshuffle

Between 2025 and 2026, India’s FMCG sector witnessed one of its most intense periods of leadership change. While each succession has its own context, the appointments point to a broader shift in what FMCG companies are looking for at the top. Here is a company-by-company look at some of the sector’s most significant leadership transitions.

Hindustan Unilever

Priya Nair replaced Rohit Jawa as MD & CEO on 1 August 2025. She joined HUL in 1995 and spent nearly three decades building her career across sales and marketing roles in Home Care and Beauty & Personal Care. She eventually became Executive Director of both businesses before taking on global roles as Chief Marketing Officer and later President of Unilever’s Beauty & Wellbeing division. Nair holds a B.Com from Sydenham College and an MBA in Marketing from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, and later completed executive education at Harvard Business School. Meanwhile, Jawa was a long-serving Unilever generalist with strong operational and emerging-markets experience, including leadership roles in North Asia and the Philippines. The change, therefore, was more than a routine succession. HUL moved from a broad general-management profile to a leader whose career has been deeply rooted in categories, consumers and brands.

Godrej Consumer Products

Aasif Malbari replaced Sudhir Sitapati as MD & CEO in August 2026. Malbari’s career offers a different route to the top. A Chartered Accountant and Company Secretary, he secured All-India Rank 1 in both the CA Intermediate and Final examinations and is a graduate of Sydenham College. He spent nearly two decades at HUL in finance and commercial roles before moving to Tata Motors, where his responsibilities included serving as CFO of the EV business. He joined GCPL as CFO in 2023 and subsequently took on the President role for the Africa portfolio, where he successfully improved EBITDA margins significantly. Sitapati, in contrast, represented the classic HUL marketing and general-management route. He spent 22 years at Unilever before joining GCPL in 2021.

Dabur India

Herjit S. Bhalla was appointed CEO, India Business in April 2026, while Mohit Malhotra was elevated to Global CEO. Bhalla brings more than 25 years of commercial experience to the role. He spent 16 years at Unilever across sales and marketing, including international roles, followed by a stint as COO at Metro Cash & Carry. His career also includes senior global positions at Hershey, where he served as Managing Director India and later as VP Canada & Global Customers. He is a Delhi University commerce graduate with an MBA from MDI Gurgaon.

The move also represents a structural change for Dabur, creating a clearer distinction between the India and global businesses. Rather than simply replacing one CEO with another, the company has brought in an external commercial operator with multinational experience for the India business while giving the global mandate to Malhotra.

Britannia Industries

Rakshit Hargave took over as MD & CEO on 15 December 2025 from Varun Berry. Hargave’s career is defined by movement across categories, companies and markets. An Electrical Engineering graduate from IIT (BHU) Varanasi, he holds an MBA from FMS Delhi.

His professional journey spans Nestlé, Domino’s, HUL and Lakmé Lever, followed by long stints at Beiersdorf, the company behind Nivea. At Beiersdorf, he served as MD India and later took on regional leadership across Asia, Africa and ANZ. Most recently, he was the founding CEO of Birla Opus, where he was tasked with scaling a new business. Berry, meanwhile, had spent 13 years at Britannia and was central to its transformation through cost discipline and portfolio expansion.

The appointment of Hargave brought a different kind of experience into Britannia’s top job: multi-category exposure, multi-geography leadership and experience in building and scaling businesses.

L’Oréal India

Jacques Lebel became Country Manager in October 2025, while Aseem Kaushik moved to the newly created Chairman role. Lebel brought international consumer-goods experience to the role, having worked with L’Oréal Mexico’s Consumer Products Division as well as Procter & Gamble and AB InBev across Europe, India, the Middle East and Africa.

Kaushik, meanwhile, was a long-time internal L’Oréal leader. The change therefore brought together two different kinds of leadership experience. Lebel added global commercial exposure across consumer businesses and markets, while Kaushik’s move to the Chairman role retained internal continuity and stakeholder management.

Nestlé India

Manish Tiwary succeeded Suresh Narayanan as Chairman & Managing Director on 1 August 2025. Tiwary brings an unusual combination to the FMCG boardroom. He holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from BIT Mesra and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. He spent more than 20 years at Unilever across sales, marketing and general management, including as MD of Unilever Gulf, before moving to Amazon India. At Amazon, he spent eight years and rose to Country Manager, adding deep exposure to digital, e-commerce and a very different consumer ecosystem to his traditional FMCG experience.

Narayanan, who spent 26 years at Nestlé, represented the classic long-tenure FMCG leadership model. He was particularly known for steering the company through the 2015 Maggi crisis and rebuilding the brand and business after the controversy.

Tiwary’s appointment shifted the emphasis from stability and recovery to growth and digital-era execution. His career straddles the conventional FMCG playbook and the newer world of e-commerce and digitally enabled consumption.

Colgate-Palmolive India

Manish Anandani will succeed Prabha Narasimhan as MD & CEO from 28 September 2026. Anandani is a Colgate veteran, having worked with the company between 2005 and 2018. His career spans sales, marketing, e-commerce and general management across India, Indochina and global roles. He most recently served as Managing Director, India & South Asia at Kenvue.

Narasimhan, who led Colgate India for nearly four years, was elevated to a global Asia-Pacific marketing role. The return of Anandani brings back a leader who already understands Colgate’s business while adding experience from outside the organisation. His exposure to e-commerce, general management and premiumisation also fits neatly with the changing demands on large FMCG businesses.

Other significant moves

At Wipro Consumer Care in 2026, Kumar Chander, an internal leader with long marketing and international experience, succeeded retiring CEO Vineet Agrawal. At Haleon India Subcontinent in 2026, Kedar Lele, formerly MD of Castrol and previously part of HUL’s sales and customer development leadership, took over from retiring CEO Navneet Saluja. Bajaj Consumer Care in 2025 and Himalaya in 2026 also saw planned successions that favoured commercial and transformation-oriented profiles.

What the leadership churn tells us

Taken together, the 2025–2026 succession cycle points to a broader shift in how Indian FMCG companies are defining the CEO job. The sector is not simply looking for leaders who have spent decades inside one organisation. Nor is it uniformly moving towards marketers or away from finance leaders. Instead, the strongest common thread is commercial breadth.

As competition intensifies, premiumisation becomes more important and consumer journeys become increasingly fragmented across physical and digital channels, the CEO mandate is also expanding. Brand building alone is not enough. Neither is operational efficiency. Companies increasingly need leaders who can connect consumers, categories, distribution, digital platforms, profitability and growth. The Indian FMCG sector is not simply changing its CEOs. It is changing the profile of the leader it believes it needs for the next phase of growth. That is what makes this wave of succession significant.