Mel Cash is the Chief Strategy Officer for Nestlé USA, leading enterprise- wide innovation and business strategy with a focus on accelerating new growth opportunities and driving consumer obsession to ensure our brands win in the market.
Mel joined Nestlé USA in 2021, overseeing our Marketing, New Business Ventures, Long-Term Business Strategy teams, and our direct-to-consumer Freshly business. She is focused on strengthening connectivity and infusing new ways of working across Strategy, Innovation, and Marketing teams and elevating capabilities and insights that unlock growth for our brands. Guiding the organization’s ambitious growth strategy, Mel reimagined and simplified the process for ensuring a foundational strategic blueprint across all categories, while driving the adoption of transformational tools and models that support consumer customization and personalization. Mel also oversees Nestlé USA’s Open Channel Challenge, our employee crowdsourcing program that encourages entrepreneurial mindsets and drives product and culture innovation from within our own walls.
Mel is a master in brand building, working across the CPG industry for more than two decades on the world’s most well-recognized brands with demonstrated leadership and extensive experience as a strategy leader, innovator and marketer. She joined Nestlé from Kellogg where she spent more than a decade, and most recently served as Vice President of Global Category Strategy, Growth Brands. In that role, Mel spearheaded Kellogg’s efforts to scale its plant-based protein and natural brand portfolios around the world. During her time at Kellogg’s, she played critical roles in both turning around declining businesses and identifying new brand development opportunities.
Prior to working at Kellogg’s, Mel held marketing and strategy roles at several leading advertising firms and at Google, working on behalf of clients like Starbucks, Bush Brothers, Jim Bean, and Ford.
Mel is incredibly passionate about driving culture and mentoring women in leadership and works with the Think Tank, Chief, that engages diverse senior executives to drive more women in to leadership.