Senior Director, Adult Sparkling, GDI

Our EMEA Innovation Center sits at the heart of The Coca-Cola Company’s next chapter of growth. We are committed to transforming and evolving our organization and ambitions — bringing our people closer to the consumer, continuously raising the bar, and embracing digitalization to enable sustainable growth. 
 
We are looking for a transformational leader to build, inspire, and empower high-performing teams that fuel the innovation pipeline with bold ideas and turn them into real-world impact. This role is not about maintaining the status quo; it is about setting direction, unlocking opportunity, and driving valuable breakthrough innovation at scale. 
 
You will lead diverse teams with deep product development expertise to deliver a strong and balanced portfolio of meaningful innovation — accelerating growth and shaping the future of the organization. 

Job Purpose Summary 

As Senior Director, Global & EMEA Adult Sparking, you will lead and develop a team of talented product developers, setting the strategy for product development in your category and prioritizing resources to deliver key initiatives. You will oversee a portfolio of high‑impact beverage innovations, ensuring concepts are translated into commercially viable products through strong technical rigor and cross‑functional collaboration. You will also build and drive a robust Global 3–5‑year innovation pipeline in close partnership with Global Marketing and RTE for your category for all OU’s together with the other Innovation Centers. This role balances strategic leadership with technical stewardship, coaching leaders, building team capability, and shaping critical decisions across formulation, quality, regulatory, and manufacturing readiness 

What You’ll Do:

Global Scope  

• Develop product innovation strategies to deliver 3–5-year pipeline for growth plans for Global Adult Sparking category across all OU’s  

• 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 and unlocking the use of new breakthrough ingredients in 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 focused on the Global pipeline for the Global category.  

Regional Scope (EMEA)  

• Adapt global technical roadmaps into products, packaging, and processes with local resonance and regulatory alignment.  

• Align on the prioritized initiatives for the category with OU Innovation Hub and Global category Leads. 

• Prioritize and manage resources to deliver committed plans.  

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

• Champion a culture of creativity, speed, and excellence in product development.  

• Ensure Stage Gate process compliance. 

• Anticipate and mitigate risks — from formulation stability to regulatory compliance — before they affect launch.  

• Transfer critical technical knowledge to plants and market teams to deliver flawless, first-time-right execution.  

• Drive project post-review and translate learning to an action plan for continuous improvement. 

• Partner with OU Hub and Category Leads to fuel the 3-5 years pipeline 

• Introduce digital efficiencies that enhance speed, reduce complexity, and elevate quality.  

What You’ll Need:

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in Food Science, Chemistry, Nutrition, Chemical Engineering, or similar. 

• 15+ years delivering successful product innovation in FMCG/beverage/food, including senior leadership experience.  

• Proven track record of turning insights into market-leading products.  

• Strategic thinker with strong cross-cultural leadership, stakeholder influence, and commercial acumen. 

• Ability to:

• Set up strategy and translate strategy into clear team priorities and executable plans.  

• Stay on top of technical, consumer and competitive trends and insights. 

• Encourage creativity within the team and removes barriers to idea generation. Build 'out-side in" capability in the team.  

• Ensure the team applies the right expertise to deliver strong outcomes.   

• Lead the team through complex problem-solving and trade-off decisions. 

• Lead, motivate, and develop a team to deliver consistent results. High level X- functional leadership  

• Make people and business decisions impacting team performance and business delivery (High Global impact and multi-year) 

• Fluent in English; regional languages a plus. 

• Global travel up to 25%.