The CPG View

Tell us about your journey. You've built eCommerce and Amazon growth engines everywhere from startups to one of the world's largest CPG companies. Looking back, what were the defining moments that shaped your career, and whatultimately led you to launch Tanagra Consulting? You've worked on both sides of the table as an operator and now as a fractional executive. What are the biggest challenges con...

Pattern highlighted research showing that brands with a TikTok Shop presence experienced 5.2 times faster average year-over-year revenue growth than brands without one. What do you believe is driving that relationship, and how should CPG executives rethink the connection between social commerce, consumer discovery, and Amazon growth? Pattern analyzed $1 billion in advertising spend and found signi...

Kaitlyn, you've built an impressive career in CPG sales and leadership, and today you lead customer development across multiple channels for Nestlé Health Science. Tell us about your journey and what inspired you to build a career in consumer products and sales leadership. The health and wellness category continues to evolve as consumer expectations change. From your perspective, what are the bigg...

Let’s start with the consumer. When someone opens a delivery app, they’re often shopping with a completely different mindset than when they walk into a store or even shop a traditional e-commerce site. What have we learned about those moments and what actually drives the decision to buy? Delivery has created entirely new shopping occasions—the forgotten ingredient, the late-night craving, the last...

Can you walk us through your career journey and the key experiences that led you to where you are today as CEO of Advantage Solutions? With the shelf now extending from in-store to digital retail media networks, how is Advantage Solutions evolving its capabilities to help brands win both the physical shelf and the digital shelf? Many CPG brands struggle to connect strategy at headquarters with fla...

We spent our last conversation talking about how quickly commerce is changing. As brands move from understanding that shift to actually responding to it, where do you think they should be placing their biggest bets today? As AI becomes embedded across media, content, retail and commerce operations, do you think the traditional boundaries between those functions start to disappear and what does tha...

You’ve had quite the journey across beauty, FMCG, e-commerce, and omnichannel. Take us back a little how did your career evolve, and what eventually brought you to leading E-Commerce and Amazon across Europe for L’Oréal Luxe? Luxury beauty is such an interesting category because the experience matters just as much as the product. How do you bring that sense of discovery, excitement, and luxury int...

Every company says they want to build long-term customer value, but then the annual budget shows up and suddenly everyone is focused on this quarter. Why is it so hard for organizations to invest today for a return they may not see until another budget cycle? Let’s talk about CLV for a minute. The concept makes perfect sense on paper, but the models can sometimes assume a level of customer loyalty...

You've said a shopping journey that used to take 19 days can now take just 19 seconds. What's driving that shift, and how are the best brands leveraging TikTok to launch products, drive discovery, and accelerate sales? You have a unique vantage point across Beauty and Food & Beverage. What separates brands that are truly winning on TikTok from those still trying to figure it out? Which...

The consumer is generating more signals than ever, but more data doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity. What are the signals you believe executives should be paying much closer attention to right now? We often talk about understanding what consumers are doing, but the harder question is understanding why. Where are you seeing the biggest gaps between traditional consumer measurement and what actua...

For years, commerce teams have been trained to look backward. What sold, what worked, what changed. What happens when intelligence starts telling us what to do next instead of simply explaining what already happened? There are hundreds of decisions being made every day around pricing, assortment, promotions, content, and inventory. Which of those decisions should we actually be comfortable handing...

1. How are you and your team at Dentsu helping brands adjust to the collapsed funnel, where discovery, consideration, and conversion can happen in the same session?2. Where does agentic AI fit into that shift, and how should brands be thinking about agentic commerce, media, workflows, and team structures?3. As you build the commerce organization at Dentsu, how do you structure teams so budgets can...

You’ve built your career across platforms, agencies, publishers, and now retail media. Looking back, what were the pivotal moments that shaped the way you think about data, measurement, and commercialization today? Albertsons Media Collective’s iROAS research found that campaign outcomes could vary depending solely on methodology, with the campaigns shifting from positive to negative based on how...

When product experience becomes an enterprise priority, where does the transformation typically begin? What needs to change internally—from ownership to processes to ways of working—before the technology can really deliver value? For executives making the case for investment, how should they measure the business impact of product experience? Which metrics best connect these capabilities to revenue...

Before launching K2O, you spent seven years helping scale MaryRuth’s. What did that experience teach you that emerging CPG brands often learn too late? K2O sits at the intersection of celebrity, wellness, beauty and functional hydration. How do you turn that initial excitement into an enduring brand with staying power? Celebrity can generate awareness quickly, but repeat purchase ultimately determ...

You’ve had a front row seat from Mars and L’Oréal to now leading Barrows Connected Store what were the key moments that really shaped your career and point of view? You’ve said stores are becoming high performance media channels but most in store experiences still feel cluttered and ineffective. Are retailers getting this fundamentally wrong today? Was there a specific moment when you saw the conv...

1.  Retail media has become a strategic priority for both retailers and brands, but not every organization is realizing the returns they expected. From your experience, what separates the companies that consistently outperform from those that struggle to generate meaningful business impact? 2.  As retail media budgets continue to grow, executives are looking beyond campaign performance and asking...

Tell us about your journey. What led you to co-found BetterBasket, and what did you see in the grocery industry that made you believe there was an opportunity to build something different? Grocery has always been a business of tight margins and complex decisions. Where do you see AI having the biggest impact today across pricing, promotions, and assortment—and where are grocers still leaving oppor...

Once a brand can identify the specific visual, messaging, and creative attributes associated with conversion, what becomes possible that simply wasn’t possible with traditional content analytics? How much can content intelligence tell us about why a consumer chooses one product over another—not just whether a piece of content performed—and where are brands beginning to uncover insights they didn’t...

You’ve led marketing efforts across startups and large CPGs before taking the helm at Archer. What have been some of the most defining moments in your journey that shaped how you lead and build brands today? Archer is carving out a space as a “better-for-you” meat snack brand in a competitive category. How do you balance staying true to your brand’s roots while continuously innovating to attract n...

  As online marketplaces mature, where do you see the next major battleground for brands—customer acquisition, profitability, loyalty, data, or something else entirely? With Walmart, TikTok Shop, Temu, and other platforms gaining attention, how should brands determine which marketplaces deserve investment and when does expanding to more platforms actually become a distraction? As AI increasingly i...

What are the fundamentals that brands need to get right first in order to create sustainable growth? Why does penetration matter so much, and what are companies getting wrong when they focus too heavily on pricing or short-term growth levers? How should brands rethink category definitions and their value propositions around consumer needs rather than the way the industry has historically defined t...

Consumer expectations around convenience have changed dramatically, especially since the pandemic. From your perspective, how has last-mile delivery evolved from a tactical fulfillment layer into something much more strategically important for brands and retailers? Many organizations still treat delivery commerce as incremental volume rather than a fundamentally different consumer behavior model....

Would you mind introducing yourself and the company you’re with? Before you became the “Amazonaholic” and recovering thought leader, who were you? What did the early days of Ryan look like? You built and sold Quiverr after driving over $1 billion in Amazon sales for brands like Drunk Elephant and Sun Bum. Looking back, what was the turning point that took Quiverr from a small idea to a successful...

What has changed most in commerce media, and what should brands and retailers be paying attention to right now? With the pace of change accelerating so quickly, how should brands and retailers think about staying ahead? As consumers increasingly use LLMs and conversational AI for product discovery, how should brands think about ranking and showing up organically—not just through paid media? What a...