PepsiCo: Building the Marketing Leader to Stretch Iconic Snack Brands into Meals

1. The Challenge

PepsiCo has made a public commitment to a new layer of growth: taking its iconic snack masterbrands into the meals and mini-meals space. Consumer habits are moving toward convenience-led meal occasions, and the company decided to compete there directly rather than watch from the snack aisle.

To deliver it, PepsiCo created Food Ventures in 2025, a global business unit headquartered in Barcelona and built to move at start-up pace inside a Fortune-scale company. The unit owns its portfolio end to end, from product development through brand, campaign, and the selling story that lands product in retail. Pilla Tortilla, the first Lay's-branded restaurant, opened in Madrid in 2026 as an early public proof point. The first retail portfolio launch was already on the calendar.

That mandate needed a senior marketing leader who could own the function outright: decide how far Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos and Ruffles could credibly stretch into Ready-to-Eat and Ready-to-Cook categories, brief product teams in categories PepsiCo had never owned, and carry that thinking across the UK, Western Europe and a second wave of markets in LATAM, the Middle East, India and China.

Capable senior marketers were never scarce. The combination was. Senior director scale inside a global multinational, a proven record of stretching a legacy brand into new territory, multi-market launch experience, and the appetite to build something from nothing in Barcelona rarely sit in the same person.

2. Profile Needed

The hard requirements were clear. Senior director standing at large multinational scale, with a track record of launching and scaling across multiple markets rather than optimising one. Single-market careers, however large the market, did not fit. Barcelona was a firm location requirement.

The defining capability was masterbrand stretch. The role needed someone who had taken an established brand into an adjacent category and made it work commercially, and who could explain the logic behind it: the brand architecture, the consumer justification, and the decisions on what to keep and what to leave behind. Category experience in sauces, dips, meal kits, and chilled, frozen or ambient ready meals was valuable, but brand stretch at scale was the capability the mandate could not do without.

The human requirements carried equal weight. Food Ventures is a new unit inside a relationship-driven company, so the hire needed to create pull across global brand teams, regional leaders and sales organisations without relying on direct authority. The brief would change as the business learned. Rigidity was a disqualifier. The right candidate had to be tenacious enough to challenge the system and flexible enough to rebuild the plan in flight.

3. The Search Process

LS International mapped the market across the UK, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland. The search covered global food majors, specialists in sauces, cooking and ready meals, chilled and frozen manufacturers, and senior marketers in adjacent consumer categories where brand stretch at multinational scale is a core discipline.
Every candidate passed through the same gates before presentation: seniority and scale, multi-market launch evidence, a documented brand stretch, and a firm commitment to Barcelona confirmed in the first conversation rather than at offer.
Assessment ran in two LS International rounds. The first tested the non-negotiables. The second, led by LS International's founder, probed motivation, resilience and how each candidate had actually operated inside a matrix. Shortlisted candidates then moved through the client's process, beginning with HR, then the hiring manager, then business unit leadership, alongside PepsiCo's structured leadership assessment.

4. Key Learnings

The category specialist and the senior multi-market leader were rarely the same person. Marketers with deep ready-meal and sauce experience were plentiful, but most had built careers in a single market or below the seniority the mandate needed. Holding both filters at once shrank the pool sharply. The search had to decide which attribute actually predicted success.

Brand stretch was the transferable skill, not category pedigree. The strongest candidates were those who had moved a trusted brand into a category where it had no right to win and made the case to consumers, retailers and their own organisation. That discipline travels across categories. A candidate who could walk through the architecture decisions behind a real stretch was more convincing than one who had spent a decade inside the target category without ever moving a brand.

Comfort with ambiguity and comfort with a matrix are different traits. A candidate who dislikes corporate politics is not automatically suited to a start-up unit, and a candidate who thrives in ambiguity may still stall in a matrix. LS International assessed each separately and required independent evidence for both. The role demanded the two together.

5. The Outcome

PepsiCo appointed Andrea, previously Smoke-Free Products Director at Philip Morris International in Spain. Andrea brings a career built across Danone, Reckitt and PMI, with local, regional and global roles spanning developed and developing markets. At Reckitt, she extended Dettol into home hygiene, exactly the kind of masterbrand stretch Food Ventures is built on, and she holds a business degree from ESADE.
The appointment gives Food Ventures a marketing leader who has stretched a trusted brand before and has done it across markets at scale. She joins as the first portfolio reaches shelf and the next wave of launches takes shape, positioned to set the brand architecture that will govern how far PepsiCo's snack icons can travel into meals.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve your executive search objectives.

State 1: PepsiCo needed a senior marketing leader to take its iconic snack brands into Ready-to-Eat and Ready-to-Cook meals through a newly formed global business unit.

State 2: Andrea joined Food Ventures with a proven record of masterbrand stretch across Danone, Reckitt and PMI, and multi-market experience across developed and developing markets.

Time Frame: 2.5 Months