Job Description:

Mars Snacking is building an internal entrepreneurship engine to develop incubate and scale the next big innovations in Snacking. This role leads the Discover Team an agile front-end innovation unit focused on identifying and addressing priority consumer pain points. This leader will drive external partnerships to bring fresh ideas and capabilities into the organization and partner with internal entrepreneurship pods to co-create marketable propositions in current and new categories. The role reports to the Global VP of Portfolio Strategy & Innovation and will have direct visibility to the One Demand Leadership Team.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership:Lead and inspire a cross-functional innovation team (Marketing Research Design Science & Tech) to address key consumer pain points fostering a startup mindset for agility and experimentation.

Platform Leadership:Own global Consumer Platforms ensuring innovation starts with meaningful consumer problems using design thinking and rapid experimentation.

Proposition Development:Transform consumer insights snacking trends and emerging technologies into high-potential business concepts collaborating across internal and external teams to develop and iterate ideas.

Collaboration & Engagement:Partner with Intrapreneurs to co-create and refine propositions communicate insights to senior leaders and build a strong internal network to deliver solutions and key learnings.

External Partnerships:Build and maintain relationships with external collaborators (labs universities startups consultancies) to enhance capabilities and accelerate innovation.

Signal Spotting:Use technology customer-buyer-regional connections and AI to monitor emerging trends and behaviors enabling early recognition and fast-follow concept development.

Governance & Metrics:Track platform performance align with enterprise strategy and use KPIs to measure and improve innovation speed efficiency and value.

The Discover team at Mars Snacking unites consumer-centric design research and Science & Tech to drive long-term innovation. Its dual mandate is to identify early signals of consumer and competitive trends to inform innovation priorities and to address key consumer pain points through front-end innovation developing high-potential propositions for our categories and brands.

Reporting to the Global VP of Portfolio Strategy & Innovation this role partners with Intrapreneurs and agile teams to develop and launch new propositions. It also builds an external ecosystem (labs think tanks universities consultants) to bring agility efficiency and fresh insights while supervising the Discovery team across Marketing Research Design and technical roles.

This role requires a consumer-obsessed individual with an intuition for weak but meaningful signals a business leader who can translate pains needs and trends into platform-able product concepts and an influencer capable of persuading other innovation leaders and entrepreneurs with their ideas.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in Business Marketing Design or a related field

Preferred qualifications:

• MBA or equivalent degree

Knowledge / Experience

• Minimum of 10 years of experience in CPG innovation (preferably in Packaged Foods) with a strong track record of creating and commercializing new products services or business models.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional teams through the front end of innovation from identifying insights and trends to concept development and early-stage validation
• Experience working with or within entrepreneurial environments (e.g. startups venture studios incubators or corporate innovation teams).
• Strong background in consumer research human-centered design thinking and agile methodologies.
• Proven ability to build and manage external partnerships with startups research institutions and other innovation partners.
• Experience presenting to inspiring and influencing senior executives and entrepreneurs

What can you expect from Mars

• Work with diverse and talented Associates all guided by the Five Principles.
• Join a purpose driven company where were striving to build the world we want tomorrow today.
• Best-in-class learning and development support from day one including access to our in-house Mars University.
• An industry competitive salary and benefits package including company bonus.

The base pay range for this position at commencement of employment is between the range listed below however base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors including but not limited to job-related knowledge skills and total compensation package for this position will include variable pay medical and dental benefits participation in 401k plan and paid time off of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an applicant receives an offer of employment.