Carsten Fredholm is a senior advisor to ArkMalibu. He retired at the end of 2020 from Nestlé after a long career within the Global FMCG industry, where he held various CEO, Commercial and Strategic roles primarily in the Food & Beverage space. During his career, he worked for companies like Nestlé, Mars, Findus (private equity), and is currently a board member and senior advisor for various companies in Europe.
In Carsten’s last assignment at Nestlé, he worked as a Strategic Board Advisor focusing on future competitive strategies based on the challenges facing global FMCG companies. Three months were spent with VCs and start-ups in Silicon Valley and Cincinnati, US.
Prior to this, Carsten was a Senior Vice President for eight years heading up the Global coffee business at Nestlé based at the Global Headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. The job focused on Strategies, R&D, Consumer Insight, Branding, and People Development. Coffee is the biggest category for Nestlé and is truly global with interesting and complex business models from “bean to cup.” With more than 100 travel days per year, this position gave Carsten a solid insight into today’s business challenges from the 180 markets in which Nestlé is selling its well-known brands like Nescafé and Nespresso.
Previous positions include five years as CEO for Nestlé in the Nordic Region (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland), three years as Business Executive Manager in Germany and five years as CEO Northern Europe for Findus (private equity), and various sales & marketing functions with Mars Inc.
The various positions with international/global insight have given Carsten a solid insight into the F&B industry, enabling him to guide and build new disruptive strategies in a very dynamic industry where new business models and speed are becoming more important than ever.
Carsten holds a degree from The Danish Export Institute (Diploma in International Marketing & Export (EE)). In addition, he holds diplomas from the Program for Executive Development (PED) at IMD, Lausanne in Switzerland, and the Global Leadership Program and the Financial Executive Seminar from London Business School.
Today, Carsten is a board member at Foster Clark in Malta (F&B) and Danish Crown Foods in Denmark (biggest meat producer in Europe) while in parallel working as a Deal Advisor for Advent International (global private equity firm) in London.
Carsten and his wife Jette are Danish citizens and have been married for 32 years. They live in Zug, Switzerland, and have raised three sons who all earned a master’s degree: Alexander lives in Copenhagen and works as a Global Commercial Lead at Novozymes; Philip is based in London and works as a Management Consultant for Publicis Sapient; Joachim is an entrepreneur in Copenhagen/Stockholm having raised his first round of investment.
