Senior Director, ARTD, Global Development & Innovation

Location(s):

Belgium

City/Cities:

Brussels

Travel Required:

00% - 25%

Relocation Provided:

No

Job Posting End Date:

February 19, 2026

Shift:

Job Description Summary:

What You’ll Do for Us:

KEY WORKING PARAMETERS

Scope & Impact

Lead the top and bottom-line growth agenda for multiple fast growing highly segmented and complex ARTD global categories and brands. This role is responsible for building and strongly drive a robust 3–5-year innovation pipeline of global and regional reach in partnership with the GDI Category network, Innovation and Technology Strategy, Global Equipment Platform, Global Marketing Category Lead, OU Innovation Hubs, OU Marketing Innovation Leaders, Strategy, Human Insights, Global Supply Chain, and Research-to-Experimentation.

Global Category Pipelines are expected to deliver sufficiency to drive +$306M Incremental KO GP impact from innovation. This leader will be accountable for category product in the TOP 15/40 markets, ensuring Global ARTD portfolio remain highly competitive.

Orchestrator of multiple TI&SC function subject matter experts and leaders, such as Flavor and Ingredient Research, Process Development, TCR, Packaging, SRA, QSE, SC, FM, CPS, etc., to identify fit-for-purpose concepts, which could be deployed through viable scalable solutions into the markets by the Innovation Center peers or Innovation Hub teams, ensuring we deliver against Innovation metrics.

This role is a member of the EMEA Innovation Center Leadership Team.

Focus Areas

Key areas of focus of this role can be summarized as follows

Global Scope

• Develop product innovation strategies to deliver 3–5-year pipeline for growth plans for Global ARTD category

• Collaborate closely with Research to Experimentation and Global Supply Chain teams to design and develop scalable solutions for next generation of category products.

• Responsible for identifying and enabling the execution of the next RtE pipeline that can help step change of the growth of the categories.

• Collaborate deeply with global and regional SRA teams to get ahead of novel ingredients approval through appropriate agencies (FDA, EFSA etc.) and unlocking the use of new breakthrough ingredients in ARTD Category.

• Deliver impactful programs to deliver against Category Strategy in long range plans and beyond.

• Partner with GDI Innovation Center peers to leverage project management routines to deliver global innovations with local consumer relevance.

• Ensure technical efforts on category are informed by consumer insights, business models and important technology trends to deliver advantaged solutions.

• Establish and maintain process and routines for cross functional inclusion in technical innovation strategy development, planning and project execution.

• Monitor external environment to identify and action on threats and opportunities for the category.

• Define and orchestrate the network for optimal people resourcing to deliver global pipelines.

• Lead and direct a multi-functional technical team (6-8 people) focused on the Global pipeline for the Global ARTD category.

Regional Scope (EMEA)

• Partner with HI and Global Marketing and GDI category to fill category pipeline with new initiatives aligned with consumer insights

• Align on the short and long term prioritized initiatives for the category in EMEA with

  • Global Marketing and GDI category

  • OU Marketing, TI&SC and TCR 

• Prioritize and manage resources to deliver committed R&D plans through the stage gate process

• Leverage transformative thinking to devise solutions within unconventional business processes, models, and capabilities, while maintaining an end-to-end systemic perspective

• Develop products for consumer test with the best ingredients and process to enable superiority, scalability and profitability

• Co-lead scale up with TI&SC, CPS and the bottler

• Capture and document learning for each project to ensure continuous improvement

FUNCTION RELATED ACTIVITIES/KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Category Leadership:

• Drive Category Big Bets to deliver against innovation metrics.

• Lead the design and front-end development of global Big Bets and partner with GDI Innovation Center peers for regional solutions as appropriate, to ensure full value of initiatives is captured across the enterprise.

• Provide inspirationa