When I was there in the mid-2000s, Nestlé's Confections and Snacks Division was a world unto itself: Butterfinger, Nestlé Crunch, Baby Ruth, Wonka, Raisinets, Nerds, SweeTarts, and dozens more.
Everything came down to margin. We counted fractions of a penny on every piece of candy, because at hundreds of millions of units those fractions are the business. I worked so closely with the sales finance team that they became my closest colleagues.
For my first two years I was a Customer Development Manager, managing a $25 million trade budget across the convenience store and specialty channels. The job sits between brand marketing and field sales, which is a hard seat in CPG, because the two sides don't always see the same thing. Part of it was reviewing the plans each sales team submitted to justify their ask. The range of proposals was eye-opening. You learn quickly that what drives behavior at retail is rarely what looks good on paper at headquarters.
In my third year I was promoted to Business Development Manager, overseeing $120 million in trade spend at the division level, leading annual account planning, running ROI analysis with Nielsen data, and managing three business analysts.
Then the Wonka plant move happened, while I still had the convenience store teams. A sugar candy facility relocated, something went wrong with the setup, and we missed an entire summer selling season. For a confections company, summer is everything: kids out of school, convenience stores, pocket change.
I spent weeks on the phone with convenience store reps every day. They were used to ordering by the truckload. Now they were asking for one or two cartons of SweeTarts, and I was walking over to supply chain to find out if we had it. When I could get them two cartons, I jumped up and down. Those were the wins we celebrated.
My Favorite Part:
All Candy Expo, now Sweets and Snacks, was unlike any trade show I've been to before or since, and for years it was at McCormick Place. I was there as an exhibitor, in a booth packed floor to ceiling with current products and new launches.
People lost their minds. Attendees would try to walk off with full retail cartons of candy bars right off the display racks. On the last day, people rolled in with empty suitcases to fill with whatever vendors didn't want to ship home.
A note on timing. Nestlé sold its U.S. candy business to Ferrero in 2018, so the brands in this story no longer sit where they did when I worked on them.
What This Means For My Clients Today:
Nestlé taught me how businesses work at the operational level. Not just strategy, but the cross-functional reality of getting things done inside a complex organization: SKU rationalization, supply chain dependencies, trade budget ROI, and managing up and across when something goes wrong. That fluency in how the pieces connect, and what happens when they don't, is something I bring to every client engagement.
