Senior Director, Business Finance — Food Portfolio Investment

The mandate

A packaged-food portfolio is investing in innovation and retail distribution while carrying an increasingly complex range of pack sizes and promotional commitments. Category plans show revenue growth but do not consistently explain how trade spending, returns and short production runs affect realised contribution. The senior director will become the permanent finance counterpart to category leadership, turning those competing resource requests into comparable investment decisions.

The first eighteen months focus on profitable assortment choices, disciplined innovation gates and measurable promotional returns. Employment is open-ended, and the leader will continue governing category investment after this foundation is established. Eighteen finance specialists support pricing, category planning and trade-spend analysis. Work is based in Delhi NCR, with periodic sales-market and factory visits to examine the operating causes behind the financial patterns.

The role may withhold financial endorsement of launches lacking approved assumptions, set evaluation standards and approve routine spending movements within delegated category budgets. Food quality, product formulation and commercial customer relationships remain with their designated owners. Material budget increases and portfolio exits need executive approval. The finance recommendation should show where a product supports a strategic proposition and where that argument merely conceals persistent uneconomic complexity.

Long-term success requires one reconciled view of net sales and investment outcomes that category, sales and finance leaders can debate productively. Promotional activity must be assessed against an appropriate baseline rather than celebrated for gross uplift. The seat does not own statutory consolidation, food-safety controls or plant scheduling, but it must translate their financial consequences into practical choices about assortment, launch sequencing and the level of resource each category merits.

What you will own

• Establish a net-sales bridge that links list price, customer terms, promotional accruals, returns and claims, giving category leaders a dependable starting point for decisions rather than several incompatible revenue measures.
• Recommend assortment changes using contribution, production complexity and distribution evidence, identifying where an apparently small product consumes disproportionate operating effort or where a low-margin item supports a justified portfolio strategy.
• Design innovation investment gates with measurable demand and cost assumptions, defining when a launch may proceed, require revision or stop before a weak case accumulates irreversible spending.
• Evaluate trade promotions against documented baseline behaviour and customer settlement outcomes, separating incremental contribution from timing shifts, stock loading and discounts on sales that would otherwise have occurred.
• Lead category resource allocation discussions with scenarios for commodity cost and consumer demand, explaining the consequences of protecting one investment at the expense of another under a constrained budget.
• Develop business-finance managers who can challenge commercial optimism constructively, investigate unsettled claims and maintain calculation controls while producing decision papers that busy category executives can actually use.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate a 22–28-year career with finance-director or comparable senior business-finance responsibility in food, FMCG, healthcare products or another channel-led product business. Provide a portfolio or launch decision where your analysis changed resource allocation. You must distinguish between reporting category results and personally shaping a consequential commercial choice with accountable business leaders.
• Bring technical command of net revenue, promotional accruals, product contribution and management accounting. The evidence sought includes a methodology for evaluating incremental promotion returns and a reconciliation that exposed misleading growth. Understanding manufacturing cost behaviour is necessary, but you are not expected to perform the technical responsibilities of production engineers or food-quality specialists.
• Have led finance professionals through conflicting category and sales objectives. Explain how you established comparable assumptions while recognising genuine differences between products, channels or lifecycle stages. Strong judgement includes the ability to defend a strategic investment whose short-term margin is weak, and to reject a strategic label when no evidence supports its claimed future value.
• Possess rigorous finance training and experience presenting alternatives to executive decision forums. A recognised professional qualification can support credibility, but selection will examine applied judgement, delegation and control discipline. You should be comfortable visiting sales and manufacturing operations, questioning the practical basis of forecasts and turning imperfect commercial information into bounded, explicit recommendations rather than false precision.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 9 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-098.