Mars Appoints Kemal Cetin As Chief Digital & Information Officer For $36 Billion Snacking Business

The appointment takes effect August 3, 2026, with Cetin reporting to Andrew Clarke and joining both the Mars Snacking Leadership Team and the Mars Digital Technologies Leadership Team. For anyone tracking how legacy consumer goods giants operationalize AI and data at enterprise scale, this is a live case study, not a press release curiosity.

The Mandate, Plainly

Cetin's remit is digital, data, and technology strategy, with explicit language about accelerating growth and advancing Mars' digital capabilities. That phrasing matters. In a $36 billion snacking business sitting inside a $65 billion-plus family-owned conglomerate, the Chief Digital & Information Officer role is not an IT maintenance seat. The company has framed the work around customer and employee experience, innovation, and what Mars calls "making better decisions" as Kellanova brands continue integrating into the portfolio.

The dual-team reporting structure is the most practical detail here. Cetin sits on both the business leadership team and the digital technologies leadership team, which typically signals a federated model: shared infrastructure and standards owned centrally, but business outcomes owned by the unit. For a portfolio that just absorbed PRINGLES, CHEEZ-IT, POP-TARTS, and KIND from Kellanova, that structure is how you avoid running twelve parallel data stacks under one brand umbrella.

The Resume Tells a Story

Cetin spent nearly three decades leading digital and business transformation across the US, UK, and Europe. His most recent role at FrieslandCampina, a global dairy cooperative, was Global Business and Digital Solutions Officer, an unusual title that fuses business ownership with digital delivery. Before that, he held leadership positions at Diageo, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Whirlpool, three organizations that have been visible test beds for AI-driven demand forecasting, route-to-market optimization, and connected-product telemetry.

The pattern is consistent: regulated, high-volume consumer goods with complex supply chains. Mars Snacking inherits that same DNA, but at a different scale and with a freshly doubled brand portfolio. Expect Cetin's first hundred days to be less about net-new AI pilots and more about harmonizing data models, governance, and tooling across the Kellanova and legacy Mars stacks, because that is where the ROI compounds fastest.

What to Watch

Three signals will reveal whether this appointment shifts strategy or just reorgs the org chart. First, how quickly Mars consolidates its data and analytics platforms across the combined brand portfolio; the snippet mentions advancing "digital technologies, data, analytics and AI capabilities," which is a tell that fragmentation is the current bottleneck. Second, whether the AI agenda stays anchored in demand planning and supply chain, the traditional CPG win zones, or expands into consumer-facing personalization, where the regulatory and brand-safety calculus gets harder. Third, the talent and vendor footprint, since a federation model means a mix of in-house platform teams and external partners, and Cetin's vendor choices will be the clearest read on his operating philosophy.

The Kellanova integration is the forcing function. Mars does not need a flashy AI announcement; it needs the new CDIO to make the combined $36 billion snacking business run on one coherent digital backbone. That is the real job description hiding inside this press release.