Nestlé’s new CEO is likely to bring a change of “pace” as the company ups its game to drive organic growth, CFO Anna Manz has said.
The appointment of Philipp Navratil, and the abrupt departure of Laurent Freixe this week, were the first topics to greet Manz as she sat down with Barclays’ head of consumer staples Warren Ackermann to discuss strategy at an investor conference yesterday (3 September).
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Navratil is a Nestlé veteran of 20 years but markets have focused on the new CEO’s relative youth compared to his peers and a coffee-centric CV.
However, speaking at the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference in Boston, Manz said the speed of the appointment will keep up “momentum in the business”.
“He’s a really strategic, thoughtful leader,” Manz said, noting Navratil was behind the roll out of Nestlé’s partnership with Starbucks into 90 countries.
She added: “He’s also very pragmatic and executionally focused. He’ll bring a freshness of perspective and I think a pace to change at Nestle.”
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By GlobalDataManz, herself a relative newcomer to Nestlé having joined the business early last year, also discussed topics ranging from addressing underperformers in the Nestlé portfolio to the threat from pure-play manufacturers focused on a single category.
A case in point was the acquisition by Keurig Dr Pepper of JDE Peet’s announced last week and then its plans to split the combined business in two to create a focused coffee business.
“We compete with both of the companies, effectively,” Manz said. “The fact that they are coming together to form a good competitor actually should be good for the category as a whole – strong competitors, strong category, all boats rise.
“But you can be sure that in the interregnum, when there may be a bit of distraction, we will be absolutely out there making sure that we take every advantage of that opportunity.”
Nestlé’s “huge advantage”
Manz addressed pure-play competitors within the frame of Nestlé’s global reach. “What blew me away when I arrived at Nestlé is the route-to-market, the power we have, be it Portugal, Chile, as you go around Indonesia, as you go around the world…of the power of our categories playing together. We’re in every aisle in the supermarket,” she said.
“That allows us to have a really different conversation with our customers and really have an amazing route-to-market and a deep understanding of the consumer. I think there’s a huge advantage there.”
Manz added: “What the pure players are good at, and we need to be equally good at, is that execution focus. And that’s where you see us focusing, driving that by category.”
New CEO Navratil is unlikely to talk strategy until Nestlé issues its third-quarter results on 16 October, the CFO suggested.
At the halfway reporting stage in April, Nestlé stuck with its full-year outlook. Freixe had refrained from pinpointing an actual organic growth target but repeated language for an improvement over the 2.2% pace in 2024.
The world’s largest food company also left its underlying trading operating profit margin (UTOP) estimate “at or above” 16% for 2025.
“This concept of focus and not managing to the law of averages is a really important one as we really raise that execution of sharpness,” Manz said yesterday.
“Rather than focus on everything equally, being really clear where those areas are that have been detracting from growth and identifying those areas that will really accelerate growth – platforms like RTD coffee and pet therapeutics.”
Freixe had pledged to address underperformers in the portfolio when he took charge and put resources behind what he called six “big bets outside of Nestlé’s billionaire categories to get to SFr100m ($124.1m) in sales annually.
“We have closed the share-loss drag associated by those underperformers by more than a third in the last six months,” Manz said.
“Some of them, actually three or four of them, are now in what I would call sustained share gains, things like Milo, which is a very important product in Asean, and biscuits in Brazil.
“Eighty per cent are moving in the right direction. You’ve got things like creamers and frozen food all moving towards share gains.”
Of the six big bets, Manz said Nestlé has “got good momentum” in the first half of 2025 with SFr200m reached “collectively”.
She added: “I would say all of them are on track. We’ve got three that are a little bit ahead, some more than others, three that are there or there about but usually it’s because we’ve been a little bit slower to execute because we wanted to get the proposition right.”
