INGAPORE: Mondelez International has handed the keys to its south-east Asian kingdom to Abhiroop Chuckarbutty, a battle-hardened consumer goods veteran who spent more than two decades navigating the treacherous waters of emerging markets from Mumbai’s bustling bazaars to Dubai’s gleaming malls.
The 22-year industry stalwart, who orchestrated the messy separation of a $500m tea business from Unilever’s sprawling empire in 2024, will now steer the American snacking giant’s charge across a region where Oreos compete with local delicacies and Cadbury chocolate battles tropical heat.
Chuckarbutty’s appointment as president comes after a year running Mondelez’s African operations from Johannesburg, where he cut his teeth on the company’s complex multi-market dynamics. Before that corporate musical chairs routine, he spent two turbulent years as president of ekaterra’s Africa, Middle East and Turkey tea business, shepherding the venture through its acrimonious divorce from Unilever in 2022.
The executive’s résumé reads like a corporate fire-fighting courseware. At Unilever, where he spent 16 years climbing the ranks, Chuckarbutty wrestled with everything from sluggish west Asian markets to the herculean task of digitising India’s advertising landscape. He juggled profit-and-loss responsibility for a bewildering array of brands—from Lifebuoy soap bars to Kissan ketchup—across markets as diverse as Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.
His new perch in Singapore puts him at the epicentre of Asia’s snacking revolution, where rising incomes and urbanisation are fuelling an insatiable appetite for packaged treats. The region’s young, mobile-savvy consumers present both opportunity and headache for western brands trying to crack local tastes whilst fending off nimble domestic rivals.
Chuckarbutty’s knack for “business turnarounds and accelerating scale businesses”—as his corporate biography modestly puts it—will be tested against south-east Asia’s fragmented markets, where regulatory tangles and supply-chain snarls can derail even the slickest marketing campaigns.
The appointment signals Mondelez’s intent to double down on a region that represents one of the fastest-growing snacking markets globally, even as trade tensions and economic uncertainty cloud the broader Asian outlook