Country Manager Benelux

With a global presence and 137 year history, family-run Hero Group is a trusted, naturally good food brand for millions of consumers. With products like jams, muesli bars, and baby formula, Hero’s is focused on their commercial functions. The Country Manager Benelux will lead the region’s operations and set their three-to-five year growth strategy.

About Hero Group

Privately-owned Hero Group is a Swiss family company that was founded in 1886. For forty years, it has grown into an FMCG brand with a global presence that offers the goodness of nature in high-quality food for consumers worldwide. Their categories include fruit preserves, healthy snacks, and baby and toddler foods, all prepared with Hero’s values of quality and simplicity.

With offices and production facilities across five continents and four thousand dedicated employees, Hero achieves its mission to delight consumers by conserving the goodness of nature in their food products every day. Their open, flexible, and informal way of working empowers its employees to make an impact on the company’s products and process. And they make sure employees have access to career opportunities and help facilitate their goals.

Hero employees share four core company values: Create Wow; Nourish Others, Everyone is a Hero; and Take Responsibility. These translate into a focus to:

1. Deliver on or above expectations
2. Treat others with care, respect, and honesty
3. Collaborate to achieve the best possible results
4. Take steps to preserve nature for future generations.

Recently, Hero Group shifted its strategic focus from global to centralized regional. This transformation has increased shared resources and services and a global vision on commercial targets. And all while maintaining a local or regional focus on marketing and sales, and a hybrid regional and global focus on category expansion. The new Country Manager of Benelux will set the commercial strategy and enable their team to achieve sizeable growth.

Vacancy: Country Manager Benelux

The Country Manager of Benelux is responsible for the P&L and all Hero Benelux operations. They cascade Hero Group’s vision and strategy into an effective rollout plan for the Benelux, focusing on the present and mid-term. First, they will set the bar to achieve new plans and enable the Management Team and entire Benelux organization to achieve success. They will also set a goal and create the strategy for Hero Benelux’s growth in the next three to five years.

The opportunities for growth at Hero Benelux are outstanding. The Dutch market is responsible for more than ninety percent of the revenue – and there is significant market share available in Belgium. In The Netherlands, the main strategic questions center around innovation and strengthening internal core categories. These include Cassis soda. It is highly successful at a local level, but not included in the global mix, and vice versa. The Country Manager of Benelux will determine the correct category mix and specific resources to allocate to the marketing and sales teams for each category and ensure commercial success that aligns with the regional market and wider Group strategy.

Although this role has a strong commercial focus, the Country Manager of Benelux is also in charge of all regional functions, such as HR, Finance, and Plan and Logistics. The Breda office employs around seventy colleagues. Fifty are members of the Benelux team. The other twenty include Group roles, like Quality and the IT Group Function: not reporting to the Country Manager Benelux, but part of the organization, culture and (HR) policies.

“For the strategy to be successful, buy-in at Group level will be required – as well as strong initiative and entrepreneurial drive. A seasoned commercial leader with strong stakeholder management and influencing skills, who role models accountability across the organization, can create a lot of value in this role.” – Jim Frandsen, General Manager Northern European Cluster of Hero Group

This position is ideal for a candidate with at least twelve years’ experience in commercial functions. These are mainly sales and marketing, as well as e-commerce, category management, and other related functions. They have people leadership experience and are confident managing an office of about fifty employees, six of whom are direct reports. The Country Manager of Benelux reports to the General Manager of the Northern European cluster. They will achieve growth for the Benelux region in the next three to five years, and enjoy the opportunity to continue developing their career into a leadership role at the Hero Group level.

Interested?

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