Amit Pandhi is a longtime food industry executive and brand builder with experience leading both emerging and established consumer brands. His career has included leadership roles at Popchips, Velocity Snack Brands and other food companies, with a particular focus on turnarounds, growth and building organizations capable of scaling.
Amit now leads Westminster Cracker Company, a heritage brand with roots dating back more than 200 years. The company is known for its oyster and soup crackers and is working to grow a highly familiar brand by expanding consumption occasions, strengthening distribution and finding new relevance with today’s consumers.
Throughout his career, Amit has worked across different stages of the food business, giving him a perspective that spans entrepreneurial brands, mature companies, operational challenges and organizational change. He sees his career as less about loyalty to individual companies and more about repeatedly solving the same fundamental challenge: how to build brands and businesses that can grow.
Strong leadership starts with hiring the right people, giving them the resources they need and then giving them enough freedom to do their jobs.
Turnarounds require leaders to identify and protect the “culture carriers,” the people throughout an organization who may not have senior titles but have enormous influence over how employees think, work and respond to change.
Transparency is especially important during periods of change. Employees can generally handle difficult news, but surprises and uncertainty can quickly undermine trust in leadership.
Mistakes should be treated as opportunities to solve problems rather than reasons for punishment. What matters is whether people acknowledge mistakes quickly, take ownership and work together to correct them.
Understanding what consumers actually buy requires looking beyond what appears on store shelves. Amit pays close attention to product date codes because they can reveal velocity and shopper behavior that assortment alone cannot.
Established brands can face a tougher challenge than emerging brands because familiarity does not necessarily translate into enthusiasm or purchase. Growth often requires changing long-held perceptions and consumer habits while maintaining the recognition the brand has already earned.
Successful innovation should create a genuinely new reason or occasion for consumers to use a product. New varieties that simply shift purchases away from an existing product may add complexity without producing meaningful incremental growth.
Consumers do not necessarily need to “love” a food brand. Amit believes enduring brands often succeed by being dependable and solving a real need at the right moment, becoming the product consumers know will not let them down.
Amit credits much of what he has learned to the generosity of the food industry and believes strongly in paying that generosity forward by helping others with knowledge, connections and resources whenever possible.
QUOTES
“Where you are now is someone else’s dream. Pay it forward. And that’s what I love so much about this industry.” (Amit)
“Hire the right people. Give them the right resources. Get the hell out of the way.” (Amit)
“I’ve never been loyal to a logo. I’ve been loyal to the same problem for 20 years, and it just keeps changing addresses.” (Amit)
“You have to handle people with grace. Just because they’re not the right fit for your organization at that point in time, it doesn’t mean they didn’t add a tremendous amount of value along the way.” (Amit)
“The shelf tells you what the category manager bought. The date code tells you what the shopper is actually buying.” (Amit)
“The most overlooked people are the culture carriers. These are people who never show up on a deck. They never show up on an org chart. But what they are is they are the hearts and minds of the organization.” (Amit)
“Most people can handle bad news. I truly believe that what they can’t handle are surprises.” (Amit)
“You should never discipline someone over a mistake, but I for sure will discipline people over hiding the mistakes. Make the mistake. Own it. Let’s roll up our sleeves together. Let’s fix it.” (Amit)
“Indifferent familiarity is the hardest disease in CPG to cure. With an emerging brand, you’re fighting for awareness. With an established brand, you have to change perception. You have to change habits. And you have to do it at the same time.” (Amit)
“Meaningful innovation unlocks a new consumption occasion. Everything else just steals from your core velocity.” (Amit)
“Nobody loves your brand. Nobody loves a cracker. What people love is that the night went fine. Our job isn’t to be adored. It’s to be the thing that didn’t let you down when somebody had 11 minutes and a hungry kid.” (Amit)
