Not long ago, the CPG COO was defined by supply chain discipline, the executive who made sure product got made, stored, and delivered on time. That job still exists. But it no longer tells the full story of what a great CPG Chief Operating Officer must do.
The explosive growth of CPG ecommerce across Amazon, Walmart.com, DTC storefronts, and emerging retail media platforms has inserted the COO into a domain that once belonged almost entirely to marketing and sales. Today, operations and digital commerce are inseparable. The COO who can’t speak fluently to both is already behind.
At Hunter & Michaels, we’ve placed CPG executives for over three decades. In the last several years, we’ve watched a clear shift in what our clients demand from COO candidates. What follows is what we’re seeing on the ground, and what it means for consumer brands looking to hire for this role.
The Ecommerce Operations Problem No One Is Talking About
CPG companies that invested heavily in ecommerce over the past decade discovered something uncomfortable: digital growth created operational chaos they weren’t built for. The problem wasn’t lack of demand, it was lack of infrastructure to serve it.
Ecommerce orders are smaller, more frequent, more varied, and far less predictable than traditional retail replenishment. They require different pack sizes, different labeling requirements, different fulfillment SLAs, and different return processes. For CPG brands, this wasn’t just a logistics challenge, it was an organizational one.
KEY FIGURES
- ~20% of total CPG sales now driven by ecommerce channels
- 3× higher fulfillment complexity vs. traditional retail replenishment
- #1 operational concern cited by CPG boards heading into 2025
Who owns this mess? In most CPG organizations, ownership is fractured. Marketing owns the digital shelf. Supply chain owns fulfillment. IT owns the systems. Finance owns the margin erosion. And nobody, often not even the CEO, has full visibility across all of it.
That’s precisely where the modern CPG COO steps in.
What a CPG COO Needs to Know About CPG Ecommerce
We’re not suggesting that every CPG COO candidate needs to have run an Amazon storefront personally. But there is a baseline fluency that is now non-negotiable in executive search. The strongest candidates demonstrate competency across several intersecting areas.
Digital Shelf Execution
A COO who understands how product content, in-stock rates, and fulfillment performance directly affect search ranking and conversion on platforms like Amazon and Walmart.com is operationally dangerous in the best possible way. These are levers that look like marketing metrics but pull from operational roots.
Omnichannel Fulfillment Architecture
DTC, drop-ship, 3PL, first-party retail, and marketplace fulfillment all have different cost structures, lead times, and customer expectations. The CPG COO needs a mental model for orchestrating these simultaneously, and the organizational design instincts to structure teams around them.
Data Infrastructure & Systems Integration
Ecommerce generates enormous volumes of operational data. Inventory velocity, return rates, delivery exceptions, demand signals by channel — a modern CPG COO doesn’t just receive these dashboards. They help design them, challenge the underlying data quality, and make decisions faster than the competition.
P&L Ownership Across Channels
Perhaps most critically: the best CPG COO candidates we speak to have carried P&L responsibility that spans both physical and digital channels. They’ve felt the trade-offs firsthand — the margin pressure from DTC shipping costs, the promotional complexity of Prime Day, the cannibalization tension between wholesale and direct.
Key competencies to look for:
- Digital shelf visibility: Understanding how operational execution affects discoverability and conversion online
- Multi-channel fulfillment: Designing and managing DTC, marketplace, and wholesale flows simultaneously
- Ecommerce-specific forecasting: Demand planning that accounts for the volatility of digital channels
- Retail media & data: Fluency in how retailer data partnerships create operational levers
- Customer experience metrics: Owning OTIF, NPS, and return rates as operational outcomes
How This Changes the CPG COO Search Process
For companies engaging in a CPG COO search today, the implications are significant. The talent pool that meets both traditional operations excellence criteria and meaningful CPG ecommerce experience is smaller than most hiring teams expect. And because both sets of skills are increasingly in demand, that talent doesn’t stay available long.
We advise clients to start their CPG COO searches with two parallel questions: What operational problems are we solving for the next 18 months? And what ecommerce capabilities do we need that we currently lack? The answers to both should shape the candidate profile.
We also counsel against waiting for the “perfect resume.” The ideal CPG COO candidate often comes from one of three backgrounds: a VP of Operations at a digitally native brand who is ready for the enterprise, a long-tenured CPG supply chain leader who took a deliberate detour through an ecommerce-heavy role, or a GM who ran a P&L that included a meaningful DTC or marketplace business. None of these looks exactly like the last COO you hired. That’s intentional.
Why This Matters Now
The window to get CPG ecommerce operations right is not unlimited. Brands that build the operational muscle now — the systems, the talent, the institutional knowledge — will compound those advantages over the next decade. Brands that continue to treat digital fulfillment as a side project owned by nobody in particular will find that gap increasingly expensive to close.
The CPG COO is, in many organizations, the executive most positioned to close it. That makes this hire one of the highest-leverage decisions a CPG leadership team can make.
How Hunter & Michaels Approaches the CPG COO Search
Hunter & Michaels has been a dedicated CPG executive search firm since 1991. Our practice is built entirely within the consumer packaged goods industry, we don’t practice across sectors, which means our network, our pattern recognition, and our candidate relationships are all concentrated where they matter most to our clients.
When we run a CPG COO search today, ecommerce operational competency is part of every structured interview, every reference conversation, and every candidate brief. We’ve developed a point of view on what good looks like, because we’ve made enough of these placements to see what works and what doesn’t across categories ranging from food & beverage to health & beauty to household products.
We work on both retained and contingency search engagements, and we tailor our process to fit the specificity of each client’s needs. If you’re building the brief for your next CPG COO, or trying to understand where the market for this talent actually is, we’d welcome the conversation.
Ready to Find Your Next CPG COO?
Hunter & Michaels has been placing CPG executives for over 30 years. Whether you’re beginning a formal CPG ecommerce search or exploring the market, our team brings unmatched industry depth to every engagement.
