Newly Appointed CEO

The Business

With a heritage dating back hundreds of years, Tangerine Confectionery is the business behind many of our favourite sweets, with Barratt, Sherbet Fountain, Dib Dab, Black Jack, Fruit Salad, Refreshers and Butterkist Popcorn amongst its most famous brands.

They are an employer to over 1,000 people and operate across five busy sites, combining traditional manufacturing methods with state of the art operations.

As well as working with some of the UK’s largest retailers across multi-channels, providing both branded and own label products, Tangerine has a growing presence internationally, trading in Australia, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.

Challenge

The newly appointed CEO faced a number of challenges as he took over at Tangerine.  At an organisational level, despite owning well-respected brands, the company was losing market share and had declining margins on the sugar confectionery side, while on the popcorn side, market leading Butterkist was fighting to maintain its position.  To change the situation, the CEO assessed he needed to align and focus the business on a growth strategy, while injecting energy and agility.

To support him and drive through change, he felt a revitalised leadership was needed, the more so since the role of CEO had been filled by an interim for the last 12 months.  He wished to mix the best of the previous team with new members promoted from within or hired externally.

Approach

Coode were engaged to provide advice to the CEO, develop a high performing leadership team (including individual coaching where appropriate), and assist in the implementation of an organisation-wide culture change programme.

Initial support focused on providing advice to the CEO as he made his assessment of the company and team.  This was immediately followed by engagement with the senior leadership team to help them build and align around the strategy to grow the company’s profitability.   Work included clearly defining strategic priorities, as well as the ways of working and behaviours (the culture) that would help execute the strategy – both within the team and throughout the organisation.

Development of the team and its individual members continued over twelve months, in parallel with support to the wider change agenda, in particular the engagement of the broader leadership community.  This included helping to manage the impact of the sale of the Butterkist business to keep the remaining, core business, focused on growth.

Impact

Driven by the commitment of the CEO and his team, the benefits realised have included:

• Clarity, alignment and focus on the key activities to execute strategy, including a renewed commitment to marketing and sales. The latter seeing an increase in the UK branded business of 8% and 45% in international sales.
• Successful divestment of Butterkist, leading to growth in core elements through more focused execution.
• A clearly articulated set of values and expected behaviours, implemented and lived at all levels of the business –‘Introduction of FACE [the values programme] has been a step change in making their behaviour more accountable’

An effective leadership team, unchanged in personnel, but strongly aligned and collaborating.  An external stakeholder comments:  ‘This is the most aligned and collaborative exec team during my time within the business’.