Food and drink companies across Southern and Central Africa are growing fast, and many are building brand and sales teams that did not exist a few years ago. Category heads, national sales heads, country managers: these roles are being created faster than the region produces people ready to fill them.
We hire for these roles across South Africa, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and their neighbours. A few patterns stand out.
The pool is small and it moves
The senior FMCG talent in this region has, in large part, come through a handful of training grounds: the global food and drink multinationals, the large bottlers, and the leading South African food companies. People move between them, and from them into regional brands and into neighbouring countries.
This means the same few hundred people are approached again and again. A good search has to go beyond the obvious names, and it has to give the candidate a real reason to listen.
Category experience is specific
A category head for energy drinks is not the same as a category head for cereals or condiments. Brand people tend to build deep knowledge of one category: its shoppers, its price points, its routes to market. A strong beverage marketer may struggle to lead a packaged food category, and the reverse.
We read for the category itself on the profile: the brands a person has run, the launches they led, the size of the business. Industry labels on their own are misleading; in many sources "beverages" mostly means beer.
Seniority shows in the customers, not the title
In South Africa especially, the same title can mean very different jobs. A key account manager with eight years may look after one channel or a set of outlets. Someone with sixteen or more years with the same title often owns the big national retail and wholesale groups.
When a role needs a person who has owned the largest national customers, it usually needs more years than the brief first suggests. We raise this at the start, so the experience band and the size of the job do not pull against each other.
The routes to market are the real skill
In much of Central Africa, products reach shoppers through distributors, wholesalers, importers and informal trade rather than modern supermarkets. Sales leaders who have built and managed distributor networks, credit terms and route-to-market models are rare and valuable. Some of the best of them work for importers and distributors, not for brand owners, and are easy to miss.
Local first, but not local only
Leaders already living in the country know the market, the customers and the way business is done. They also accept offers more often. We search locally first, then look at nationals working abroad who may want to come home, and only then at people who would need to relocate from elsewhere.
What works
- Read the category on the profile, not just the industry.
- Match years to the size of the customers the role will own.
- Look at distributors and importers, not only brand owners.
- Start local, then look at the diaspora.
