Since the beginning of October 2023, Philippe Thomas has been responsible for the newly created country unit Germany as Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Vion Food Group. The biotechnology and bioindustry expert will use his extensive expertise and many years of experience within the new country organisation in Vion’s most important sales market, Germany.
Earlier this month, Vion appointed Philippe Thomas (43) as its new Chief Operating Officer (COO) Germany. As the company’s lead of Germany, he is responsible for and controls the local livestock purchasing, the plants (slaughtering, cutting, processing, packaging) and sales.
Philippe Thomas has been working for Vion since he started his career as Sales Manager Export at Vion Crailsheim more than twenty years ago. During this time, he held various senior management positions in Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy, among other countries, before being appointed COO Retail of Vion in November 2019. In this role, as a member of Vion’s Executive Committee, he was responsible for the Retail Business Unit in Germany and the Benelux countriesRonald Lotgerink, CEO of Vion: “His career in our company with most versatile, senior management functions makes Philippe Thomas an unparalleled internationally experienced market expert and an outstanding leader of our newly created country unit Germany.”
Philippe Thomas: “I am proud of this position, which I see as an opportunity and a challenge. Above all, I firmly believe that together we will shape a sustainable future for the industry. To achieve this – in our most important home market Germany – creating a closer connection between farmers and customers is an outstanding task that I am very much looking forward to”.
Change that Matters for Food that Matters
In October 2022, Vion launched an internal transformation programme to adapt its own organisational structure and performance to the turbulent market developments. “Change that Matters” envisages a performance improvement of €150 million per year to be achieved by 2025, offsetting volume decline, margin pressure and inflation, and improving results. The goal is to accelerate the strategy implementation of sustainable, integrated supply chains and to be an industry leader in driving the industry transformation towards greater sustainability. Part of the programme includes restructuring the organisation into two country units for Germany and Benelux, establishing a “Science & Sustainability” function anchored in the Executive Committee, and introducing the Ingredients division as an independent business unit. The activities of the Food Service business unit will continue to be supervised in all countries by Simon Morris as COO.
The Executive Committee of Vion consists of Ronald Lotgerink as CEO, Tjarda Klimp as Chief Financial Officer, Philippe Thomas as COO Germany, Leon Cuypers as COO Benelux, Simon Morris as COO Food Service (transnational), Freek van den Eijnden as CSSO Science and Sustainability and COO of the Ingredients business unit, Binne Visser as Chief Human Resources Officer and Mattijn Bak as Chief Transformation Officer.