SECURING HIGH-PERFORMING FMCG, Food & Beverage AND Fresh Produce leaders to drive your business forward

Executive Search and Retained Recruitment across ANZ & APAC, from senior executives to key management roles.

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TRUSTED BY Industry

Recognising Your Industry's Unique Challenges

Our deep understanding of the FMCG sector ensures we deliver leadership solutions that align perfectly with your business needs.

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Deep Dive into Your Business

Our process starts with a comprehensive consultation, during which we immerse ourselves in your business’s strategic goals, culture, and unique challenges. We recognise that every assignment is unique. 

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Proactive Talent Mapping

We don't wait for talent to come to us. We proactively map the FMCG landscape, targeting the high-performing professionals who aren't actively seeking new roles, ensuring you're connected with the best talent.

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Precision in Selection

Our rigorous selection process, including behavioural assessments and cultural alignment checks, ensures that the leaders we place are a fit for the role and a driving force for your company's growth.

Our Services

Leveraging our 30 years of experience in executive search in FMCG and food and beverage manufacturing, we specialise in delivering tailored solutions for executive and senior roles. 

Executive Search

Find the right C-suite, executive leaders, and NED who align with your FMCG business goals and vision.

Retained Recruitment

Supporting senior management and department head roles through our dedicated retained recruitment model.

Interim Executive

Fill crucial leadership gaps with experienced interim executives to ensure continuity and stability.

Executive Assessment

Our assessment services use detailed psychometric and behavioural evaluations to ensure you find the right skills and cultural fit within or outside your organisation. 

Talent Mapping 

Our talent mapping services provide you with critical insights into the market, including competitor intelligence and identification of key players. 

6-weeks Turnaround Time

We adjust timelines based on urgency to meet your needs. Our search projects typically take 4-6 weeks to shortlist. Our efficient and methodical approach ensures you secure the right leadership without unnecessary delays.


Contact us today to start finding the best talent for your FMCG business.

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Decades of FMCG Experience

With over 30 years of executive leadership in the FMCG industry, John Elliott delivers unmatched expertise in building high-performing leadership teams. His deep industry knowledge and hands-on experience ensure your business secures the high performers needed to drive growth and innovation—partner with John to leverage his insights and elevate your organisation's leadership.

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We set out to create an executive search firm that truly understands your industry, solving hiring challenges with insights from those who’ve walked in your shoes.” - John Elliott, Founder.

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Expertise Across Every Role and Sector Across FMCG

Specialising in C-suite, NED, executive management, heads of department, and senior management roles tailored to various functional areas and categories.

Functional Areas


Finance


Human Resources


Marketing


Procurement


Operations


Retail Operations


Sales


Supply Chain & Logistics


Technical 


Categories


Stop relying on outdated recruitment methods—partner with FMCG experts who consistently deliver leaders that drive your business forward.

Industry Insights & Updates

With our extensive experience in the FMCG sector, we know which latest news is turning heads in the industry. Our updates help you stay informed and connected, ensuring you remain relevant in a constantly evolving market.

By John Elliott June 26, 2025
You don’t hear about it on the nightly news. There’s no breaking story. No panic. No protests. Just rows of vegetables being pulled out of the ground with no plan to replant. Just farmers who no longer believe there’s a future for them here. Just quiet decisions — to sell, to walk away, to stop. And if you ask around the industry, they’ll tell you the same thing: It’s not just one bad season. It’s a slow death by a thousand margins. 1 in 3 growers are preparing to leaveIn September 2024, AUSVEG released a national sentiment report with a statistic that should have set off alarms in every capital city: 34% of Australian vegetable growers were considering exiting the industry in the next 12 months. Another one-third said they’d leave if offered a fair price for their farm. Source: AUSVEG Industry Sentiment Report 2024 (PDF) These aren’t abstract hypotheticals. These are real decisions, already in motion. For many, it’s not about profitability anymore, it’s about survival. This isn’t burnout. It’s entrapment. Behind the numbers are people whose entire identity is tied to a profession that no longer feeds them. Many are asset-rich but cash-poor. They own the land. But the land owns them back. Selling means walking away from decades of history. Staying means bleeding capital, month by month, in a system where working harder delivers less. Every year, input costs rise, fuel, fertiliser, compliance. But the farmgate price doesn’t move. Or worse, it drops. Retail World Magazine reports that even though national vegetable production increased 3% in 2023–24, the total farmgate value fell by $140 million. Growers produced more and earned less. That’s not a market. That’s a trap. What no one wants to say aloud The truth is this: many growers are only staying because they can’t leave. If you’re deep in debt, if your farm is tied to multi-generational ownership, if you’ve invested everything in equipment, infrastructure, or land access, walking away isn’t easy. It’s a last resort. So instead, you stay. You cut your hours. Delay maintenance. Avoid upgrades. Cancel the next round of planting. You wait for something to shift, interest rates, weather, prices and you pretend that waiting is strategy. According to the latest fruitnet.com survey, over 50% of vegetable growers say they’re financially worse off than a year ago. And nearly 40% expect conditions to deteriorate further. This isn’t about optimism or resilience. It’s about dignity and the quiet erosion of it. Supermarkets won’t save them, and they never planned to In the current model, supermarket pricing doesn’t reflect real-world farm economics. Retailers demand year-round consistency, aesthetic perfection, and lower prices. They don’t absorb rising input costs, they externalise them. They offer promotions funded not by their marketing budgets, but by the growers’ margins. Farmers take the risk. Retailers take the profit. And because the power imbalance is so deeply entrenched, there’s no real negotiation, just quiet coercion dressed up as "category planning." Let’s talk about what’s actually broken This isn’t just a market failure. It’s a policy failure. Australia’s horticulture system has been built on: Decades of deregulated wholesale markets Lack of collective bargaining power for growers Retailer consolidation that has created a virtual duopoly Export-focused incentives that bypass smaller domestic producers There’s no meaningful floor price for key produce lines. No national enforcement of fair dealing. No public database that links supermarket shelf price to farmgate return. Which means growers, like James, can be driven into loss-making supply contracts without ever seeing the true economics of their product downstream. But the real silence? It’s from consumers. Here’s what no one wants to admit: We say we care about “buying local.” We say we value the farmer’s role. We share those viral posts about strawberries going unsold or milk prices being unfair. And then we complain about a $4 lettuce. We opt for the cheapest bag of carrots. We walk past the "imperfect" produce bin. We frown at the cost of organic and click “Add to Cart” on whatever’s half price. We’re not just bystanders. We’re part of the equation. What happens when the growers go? At first, very little. Supermarkets will find substitutes. Importers will fill gaps. Large agribusinesses will expand into spaces vacated by smaller players. Prices will stay low, until they don’t. But over time, we’ll notice: Produce that travels further and lasts less. Fewer independent growers at farmer’s markets. Entire regions losing their growing identity. National food security becoming a campaign promise instead of a reality. And when the climate throws something serious at us, drought, flood, global supply shock, we’ll realise how little resilience we’ve preserved. So what do we do? We start by telling the truth. Australia is not food secure. Not if 1 in 3 growers are planning to exit. The market isn’t working. Not when prices rise at the shelf and fall at the farmgate. The solution isn’t scale. It’s fairness, visibility, and rebalancing power. That means: Mandating cost-reflective contracts between retailers and suppliers Enabling collective bargaining rights for growers Building transparent data systems linking production costs to consumer prices Introducing transition finance for smaller producers navigating reform and climate pressure And holding supermarkets publicly accountable for margin extraction But more than anything, it means recognising what we’re losing, before it's gone. Final word If you ate a vegetable today, it likely came from someone who’s considered giving up in the past year. Not because they don’t care. But because caring doesn’t pay. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about sovereignty, over what we eat, how we grow it, and who gets to stay in the system.  Because the next time you see rows of green stretching to the horizon, you might want to ask: How many of these fields are already planning their last harvest?
By John Elliott June 20, 2025
If you're leading an FMCG or food manufacturing business right now, you're probably still talking about growth. Your board might be chasing headcount approvals. Your marketing team’s pitching a new brand campaign. Your category team’s assuming spend will bounce. But your customer? They’ve already moved on. Quietly. Like they always do. The illusion of resilience FMCG has always felt protected, “essential” by nature. People still eat, wash, shop. It’s easy to assume downturns pass around us, not through us. But this isn’t 2020. Recessions in 2025 won’t look like lockdowns. They’ll look like volume drops that no promo can fix. Shrinking margins on products that no longer carry their premium. Quiet shelf deletions you weren’t warned about. The data’s already there. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, consumer spending is slowing in real terms , even as inflation eases. The Reserve Bank confirmed in May: household consumption remains subdued amid weak real income growth . And over 80% of Australians have cut back on discretionary food spending , according to Finder. They’re still shopping, just not like they used to. A managing director at a national food manufacturer told me recently: “We won a new product listing in April. By July, it was marked for deletion. The velocity wasn’t there, but neither was the shopper. We’d forecasted like 2022 never ended. Rookie mistake.” That one stuck with me. Because I’ve heard it before, just in different words.
By John Elliott June 6, 2025
On paper, they were fully resourced. No complaints logged. No formal red flags. Delivery metrics holding steady. But behind closed doors, the signs were there. Delays. Fatigue. Silence in meetings where pushback used to live. And a growing sense that key people were leaning out, emotionally, if not yet physically. When the cracks finally showed, the conclusion was predictable: “We need more people.” But that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was trust. And most organisations never see it until it’s too late. The Hidden Cost of Disengagement In Gallup’s 2023 global workplace report , only 23% of employees worldwide reported being actively engaged at work. A staggering 59% identified as “quiet quitting”, psychologically detached, going through the motions, doing only what their job description demands. Source: Gallup Global Workplace Report 2023 Disengagement is expensive. But it’s also quiet. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It doesn’t send a Slack message. Disengagement isn’t new, just silenced. And in executive teams, it looks different. It looks like polite agreement in strategy meetings. It looks like leaders shielding their teams from unrealistic demands, instead of confronting the system causing them. It looks like performance metrics still being met… while people emotionally check out. The issue isn’t always capability. It’s safety. Psychological, political, and professional. Many senior leaders don’t raise concerns, not because the problem isn’t real, but because they don’t believe they’ll be heard, supported, or protected if they do. And this is where the failure begins. The Leadership Lie No One Talks About We talk a lot about leadership capability. About experience, commercial acumen, execution strength. But we don’t talk enough about context. Every leadership hire walks into a culture they didn’t create. They inherit unwritten rules, quiet alliances, and legacy power structures. If those dynamics are broken, or if trust is fractured at the top, no amount of capability will compensate. According to a 2022 Deloitte mid-market survey, 64% of executives said culture was their top strategic priority. But only 27% said they actually measured it in a meaningful way. We say culture matters. But we rarely structure around it. And so new leaders walk in with pressure to perform, but little real insight into what the role will cost them emotionally, politically, or personally. We Don’t Hire for Trust. And It Shows. In executive search, the conversation is often dominated by pedigree and “fit.” But fit is often a euphemism for sameness. And sameness doesn't build trust, it maintains comfort. We rarely ask: Does this leader know how to build trust vertically and horizontally? Can they operate in a low-trust environment without becoming complicit? Will they challenge inherited silence, or unconsciously uphold it? Instead, we hire for confidence and clarity, traits that often mask what’s broken, rather than reveal it. And when those hires fail? We call it a mismatch. Or we cite the usual: “lack of alignment,” “wasn’t the right time,” “they didn’t land well with the team.” But the truth is often uglier: They were never set up to succeed. And no one told them until it was too late. The Cultural Infrastructure Is Missing One of the most damaging myths in leadership hiring is that great leaders will “make it work.” That if they’re tough enough, experienced enough, skilled enough, they’ll overcome any organisational dysfunction. But high-performance isn’t just personal. It’s systemic. It requires psychological safety. A clear mandate. The backing to make hard decisions. The freedom to speak the truth before it becomes a PR problem. When that infrastructure isn’t there, when the real power dynamics are unspoken, good leaders stop speaking too. And the silence spreads. What Trust Breakdown Really Looks Like Often, the signs of a trust breakdown don’t show up in dramatic ways. They surface subtly in patterns of underperformance that are easy to misread or excuse. You start to notice project delays, but no one flags the root cause. Teams keep things moving, quietly compensating for the bottlenecks rather than surfacing them. Not because they’re careless, but because they’ve learned that early honesty doesn’t always earn support. New leaders hesitate to make bold calls. Not because they lack conviction, but because the last time they did, they were left exposed. Board reports look flawless. Metrics track nicely. But spend five minutes on the floor, and the energy tells a different story. These are not resource issues. They’re relationship issues. And the data backs it. According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report , just 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged. Worse, around 60% are “quiet quitting.” That’s not just disengagement. It’s people doing only what’s safe, only what’s required, because trust has quietly eroded. Gallup also found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, a staggering figure that reinforces just how pivotal leadership trust is. When people don’t feel psychologically safe, they shut down. Not dramatically. Quietly. Invisibly. What’s breaking isn’t the org chart. It’s the ability to speak plainly and be heard. And by the time it’s visible? The damage is already done, and someone calls for a restructure. “Low engagement is estimated to cost the global economy $8.8 trillion, 9% of global GDP.” Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2023 So What’s the Real Takeaway? If you’re seeing performance issues, before you jump to headcount, ask a different question: Do the leaders in this business feel safe enough to tell the truth? Because if they don’t, the data you’re reading isn’t real. And if they do, but you’re not acting on it, then they’ll stop telling you. Leadership doesn’t fail in obvious ways anymore. It fails in the gap between what people know and what they’re allowed to say. And the price of that silence? Missed opportunity. Reputational damage. Cultural decay. Sometimes, the problem isn’t who you hired. It’s what you’ve made it unsafe to say.
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faq

  • What roles does ELR Executive typically recruit?

    ELR Executive specialises in recruiting for a broad range of high-level roles within the FMCG sector, including Non-Executive Directors, C-Suite positions, and senior management roles in areas such as Finance, Human Resources, Manufacturing, Marketing, Procurement, Operations, Retail Operations, Sales, Supply Chain & Logistics, and Technical functions.

  • Why should we use ELR Executive?

    With over 30 years of experience in the FMCG industry, ELR Executive is uniquely positioned to deliver top-tier leadership talent. Our customised, rigorous search methodology ensures that we find highly skilled leaders who are a perfect fit for your company's culture and long-term goals. Our 98% placement rate and 100% retention rate speak to our ability to deliver high-performing talent that drives growth and success.

  • What clients/companies do we represent?

    ELR Executive partners with some of the most renowned FMCG businesses across Australia, working within key industry categories such as Bakery and Confectionery, Beer and spirits, Beverage Manufacturing, Dairy, Food Manufacturing, Health and wellness, Meat and poultry Processing, Pet Food Manufacturing, Pharmacy, Vitamins and supplements, and Retail Operations.

  • What happens in the event of a problem hire?

    At ELR Executive, we stand by the quality of our placements. In the unlikely event of a problem hire, we offer a six-month replacement guarantee, ensuring your organisation continues to benefit from high-performing talent without disruption. Our process includes rigorous assessments and regular follow-ups to minimise risks, providing a smooth and successful transition for your new leader.

  • How does the exec search process work?

    Our executive search process begins with a deep dive into your organisation's needs, goals, and culture. We then map the talent landscape, leveraging our extensive network and market knowledge to identify and engage with both active and passive candidates. We conduct rigorous assessments, including in-depth interviews and behavioural evaluations, to ensure a strong fit. Throughout the process, we maintain full transparency, providing regular updates and ensuring you have the information you need to make informed decisions.

  • So how do we get started?

    Getting started with ELR Executive is simple. Schedule a consultation with our team to discuss your specific needs and goals. From there, we'll work with you to develop a tailored strategy for your executive search, providing ongoing support and expertise at every process step. Contact us today to find leaders who will drive your FMCG business forward.

  • What is an Interim executive?

    An interim executive is a senior professional who temporarily fills a key leadership role within an organisation. These executives are often brought in during periods of transition, crisis, or sudden vacancy that needs to be filled quickly. Interim executives are experienced leaders who can provide stability, strategic direction, and management expertise while the company searches for a permanent replacement or navigates a challenging period. Their roles vary widely, from CEO and CFO positions to senior management roles, depending on the organisation's needs.

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