Why Heineken, Conagra and Hershey Are All Replacing CEOs at Once

The most dangerous job in consumer goods right now is not running a fragile startup. It is running one of the world's largest food and drink companies. Among the 50 biggest consumer-product firms, roughly 15 changed chief executive during 2025 — about 30%, well above the wider market — and that churn has made consumer goods the shortest-tenure sector for CEOs in recent years. Boards that once handed chief executives the better part of a decade to deliver are now measuring them in quarters.

The next thirty days make the point in person. Heineken's Dolf van den Brink steps down on 31 May after about six years in the top job and 28 at the company; Conagra's Sean Connolly leaves the same day after a decade in which the share price fell sharply; Hershey's Michele Buck retires on 30 June after nearly nine years. Three of the most recognisable names in food and beverage will change hands inside a single month — and the timing is not a coincidence.

What the boards actually want

The common thread is not scandal. It is the end of the pricing-power era. Through the inflation of 2021 to 2023, Big Food could raise prices and book the result as growth; volumes were flat or falling, but revenue still climbed. That trick has run out. Shoppers have traded down to private label, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are reshaping appetite and basket size, and health and regulatory pressure is squeezing core categories from confectionery to soft drinks. The reckoning is really a referendum on one question: can this company still grow when it can no longer raise prices? Most incumbent CEOs built their careers on the opposite skill.

The replacements tell the story

Where boards look for successors is the real signal. Around a third of new consumer-goods chief executives last year were hired from outside the company, many with explicit turnaround records. Some boards have gone further and reinstalled former leaders who ran the business in its growth years — Jim Koch back at Boston Beer, Joe Scalzo at Simply Good Foods, Jeffrey Ettinger at Hormel. Nestlé's reset under Philipp Navratil, with 16,000 jobs cut and its ice cream and water arms carved out, is the template others are now being hired to copy. Boards are no longer recruiting brand stewards; they are recruiting operators with a mandate to cut, refocus and rebuild volume.

This is a strategy signal, not an HR story

Each leadership change is a portfolio decision waiting to happen. A new chief executive arrives with a rare licence to take write-downs, exit categories and announce the deals a predecessor spent years avoiding — all of it framed as cleaning up an inheritance. Every new Big Food CEO is a divestiture, an acquisition or a restructuring that has not been announced yet. The incoming Heineken boss inherits a beer slump alongside a fast-growing no-alcohol business that needs capital; Hershey's successor inherits a cocoa-cost crisis; Conagra's John Brase inherits a portfolio under private-label siege. For M&A advisers and private equity, the leadership map has quietly become a deal pipeline.

Looking ahead

None of this reverses in 2026. With consumer goods the shortest-tenure sector and boards now rewarding decisiveness over patience, expect more exits, more outsider hires, and more portfolios reshaped inside a new chief executive's first hundred days. The companies that can prove they grow on volume rather than price will keep their leaders and their valuations; the ones that cannot will keep changing both. For operators, investors and buyers, the smartest move is to read the org chart as a strategy document — because the next wave of asset sales and acquisitions will be signed by chief executives who do not yet have their feet under the desk.