Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer

Brand Masters is one of Europe’s fastest-growing international FMCG companies. With revenue around four hundred million euros and PE investor Avedon fueling an ambitious European buy-and-build strategy, the company is evolving from a trading house into a brand owner. The Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer shapes this transformation at its core.

About Brand Masters

Brand Masters occupies a distinctive position within the FMCG value chain. The Breda- based company connects the world’s leading consumer brands such as Unilever, Coca- Cola, Mars, and Red Bull with Europe’s non-food retail channels, including discounters, variety stores, garden centers, and drug stores selling beyond their categories. These channels offer substantial incremental revenue opportunities but fall outside the operational scope of traditional FMCG players. Through strong channel expertise and an agile, entrepreneurial approach, Brand Masters effectively bridges this gap.

What sets Brand Masters apart is its deliberate multichannel, multicategory strategy. While many competitors focus on a single category, the company operates across food, beverages, homecare, and personal care, serving the same key accounts with a broad and integrated offering. A meaningful share of the turnover of A-brand partners such as Unilever, Mars, and Coca-Cola flows through Brand Masters, handling products no one else can place. These partnerships reflect a long-term, strategic collaboration rather than transactional distribution.

Expanding into brand ownership
Through BrandLab, its internal product development and licensing unit, the company is building its own product portfolio. This ranges from licensed brand extensions, such as Squid Game energy drinks, to proprietary food and personal care lines. An upcoming acquisition in personal care will further strengthen these capabilities.

Plans are ambitious: by 2030, own and exclusively licensed products should ideally account for fifty percent of total revenue, alongside fifty percent from A-brands. Current revenue stands at nearly four hundred million euros, with a target for rapid growth. Avedon Capital has reaffirmed its long-term commitment, signaling continued confidence in the platform being built.

Vacancy: Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer

The shift towards own and exclusively licensed products fundamentally reshapes Brand Master’s economic model, driven by a significantly stronger margin profile. As this part of the portfolio expands, it places increasing demands on portfolio discipline, innovation capabilities, and structured decision-making. Scaling the organization to manage this growing complexity effectively sets the strategic context for the Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer.

Brand Masters’ success has been built on commercial speed and entrepreneurial conviction. Preserving that edge while introducing greater focus on where and how the business grows defines the next phase. The Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer ensures that growth is fast, increasingly deliberate, and value-driven, without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Four core focus areas
The role is centered on four key responsibilities. First, it involves setting the direction for the portfolio, determining which categories, markets, propositions, and white spaces are most attractive while deliberately deciding what not to pursue, and ensuring that every new initiative supports the shift toward structurally higher-margin returns.

Second, the role drives innovation and product development from concept to shelf at the speed the market demands, orchestrating the work of creatives, designers, suppliers, QA, and IP management to deliver hundreds of new products in channels where the product lifecycle can be as short as sixteen months. Third, underpinning the margin transformation means focusing on propositions that generate greater value, aligning both new products and acquisitions with the company’s economic objectives. Finally, the Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer acts as a strategic partner in acquisitions and international expansion. This role ensures that target companies and product lines integrate seamlessly into the broader portfolio, maintaining momentum, quality, and return potential across the organization.

Reporting directly to CEO Marcel Koekoek and presenting at supervisory board meetings, this position comes with full executive mandate and a seat on the Managing Board next to the CFO, COO and the CCO. At the point of joining, the Chief Portfolio & Innovation Officer assumes direct responsibility for BrandLab, with a dedicated BrandLab Manager reporting into the role and leading a team of twelve FTE. Following closing, it also provides C-level oversight for the acquired personal care company, managing approximately forty FTE. The business already generates substantial revenue, and Brand Masters is targeting significant growth.

“This position is for a true product person who thrives in an entrepreneurial culture, someone who can walk through a factory and instinctively know whether everything is on track. At the same time, they bring the structure and focus needed to scale without slowing the speed and agility that define us. Portfolio strategy is the single most powerful lever for our future, and this position offers the opportunity to shape it from the ground up.” – Marcel Koekoek, CEO

The ideal candidate comes from a manufacturer or brand-owner background in FMCG, with experience in personal care, beauty, or cosmetics preferred, and potentially combined with food or other adjacent consumer goods categories where product development, sourcing, packaging, QA, and commercial translation intersect. This is a role for a strong product and portfolio builder who can identify high-margin growth opportunities and support the company’s evolution from opportunistic success to a scalable, future-proof business. This person takes ownership and brings the seniority to engage in board-level discussions, acquisitions, and scaling decisions, combining discipline, product intuition, and entrepreneurial drive to bring the next chapter of the business to life at speed.

Interested?

Brand Masters is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.
To express your interest, please contact Janko Klaeijsen at janko.klaeijsen@topofminds.com