Candy, Margin, and the Art of Counting Pennies
Challenge:
Nestlé's Confections & Snacks Division was a world unto itself — Butterfinger, Nestlé Crunch, Baby Ruth, Wonka, Raisinets, Nerds, SweeTarts, and dozens more. My job was: first as the liaison between field sales and headquarters managing a $25 million trade budget across convenience store and specialty channels, then I was promoted to Business Development Manager overseeing $120 million in trade spend at the division level.
At a company this size, everything came down to margin. We counted pennies of profit on every piece of candy. I worked so closely with the sales finance team they became my closest colleagues — because in that environment, the numbers were the strategy.
The Result:
Over three years, I managed trade budgets, led annual account planning, built and ran ROI analysis on promotional programs using Nielsen data, and eventually oversaw a team of three business analysts tracking daily revenue by channel. I also managed promotional dollars which meant reviewing promotional plans submitted by each sales team justifying their ask and how they planned to deploy it. The range of creative proposals that came across my desk was eye-opening. You learned quickly that what actually drives behavior at retail is rarely what looks good on paper back at headquarters.
Then the Wonka plant move happened.
When 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. The financial impact was significant.
I spent weeks on the phone with convenience store sales reps every single day. They were used to ordering by the truckload. Now they were asking for one or two cartons of SweeTarts, and I was physically walking over to the supply chain team 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 called Sweets & Snacks — was unlike any trade show I've been to before or since. Nestlé had a massive booth packed floor to ceiling with current products and new launches, and the energy on the show floor was electric.
People lost their minds. Attendees would try to walk off with full cartons of candy bars — not individual pieces, full retail cartons — right off the display racks. On the last day, people literally rolled in with empty suitcases to fill with whatever vendors didn't want to ship home.
What This Means For My Clients Today:
Nestlé taught me how businesses actually 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, 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.
