PepsiCo’s Health Strategy Circles Around Lisa Mann

The former Kraft/Mondelez executive has joined PepsiCo to work on the company’s healthier brands.

January 06, 2017

PURCHASE, N.Y. – By finally filling its global nutrition senior vice presidency, PepsiCo continues its shift toward making nutrition a more important part of its portfolio, Advertising Age reports. Lisa Mann, a former Kraft/Mondelez executive and Kind marketer who headed her own agency for a time, now helms the global nutrition division, which focuses on the long-term plans for the company’s healthier brands, such as Tropicana, Naked and Quaker.

Mann has expressed her interest in the healthier side of food. “I left Kind because I really wanted to have the opportunity to effect greater change in food and health and wellness,” she said several months ago.

She moved to PepsiCo because “I truly felt [this] was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create change at a scale level and affect a bigger part of the population. … I think the Quaker brand is an extraordinary brand that is inherently linked to health and wellness and ... I would love to be a part of the team that makes it even more contemporary and relevant.”

PepsiCo has made other changes in the nutrition group lately, hiring Morgan Flatley as chief marketing officer and Koen Burghouts as vice president of dairy. However, a December report in the Wall Street Journal noted that “despite an expanding stable of 'good for you' brands like Quaker oatmeal, Naked juice and Sabra humus, PepsiCo fell behind the goal it made in 2010 to triple revenue from nutritious products to $30 billion this decade.”

Mann said she will market healthy brands differently than snack foods. “In health and wellness, it's about helping consumers find solutions, but they are in charge, versus the push strategy of classic CPG,” she said. “But I do think there is an inherent switch to how do you help people find the product [and] the tools to live a healthier lifestyle, versus telling. And we need to think through over the coming months and year [about] how to do that.”

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