“Experience creates the greatest value when it is used to help others grow, succeed, and build what comes next.”
Jan van Marwijk Kooij is a senior food, dairy, and beverage executive whose career spans nearly four decades of strategic leadership, commercial growth, business transformation, and international market development. With extensive experience across the United States and Europe, as well as business exposure throughout Asia, Africa, and other international markets, Jan has built a reputation for translating complex market opportunities into practical growth strategies. His career combines the discipline of global corporate leadership with the adaptability and entrepreneurial mindset required to build emerging businesses, enter new markets, strengthen brands, and scale organizations profitably.
Jan’s professional foundation is deeply rooted in the food and consumer products sector. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Food Science from HAS Green Academy in the Netherlands, with an academic focus that included dairy and beverage technologies and marketing, he continued his education at Alliance Manchester Business School in the United Kingdom. There, he earned an MBA in Marketing and International Management. This combination of technical food-industry knowledge and advanced commercial education helped shape a career in which Jan has consistently understood both the product and the marketplace, enabling him to connect operations, consumer needs, customer relationships, marketing strategy, and financial performance.
His early career with Royal Wessanen provided Jan with broad exposure to marketing, export sales, private label, breakfast cereals, cereal bars, bakery products, and beverages across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Working across countries and categories gave him an early appreciation for the importance of cultural awareness, local market dynamics, distribution strategy, and customer expectations. He demonstrated his ability to accelerate international growth by expanding export sales dramatically and improving gross margin performance, establishing a pattern that would continue throughout his career: identifying underdeveloped opportunities, creating a focused commercial strategy, and converting that strategy into measurable results.
Jan later joined PepsiCo, where he advanced through increasingly senior positions in sales, business development, franchise leadership, and general management. His responsibilities ultimately included leadership across France, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, with full profit-and-loss accountability for a major multi-country beverage operation. In that role, he directed sales, marketing, finance, and operations while leading an organization of more than 220 employees. Jan transformed a declining and unprofitable business into a growing enterprise, tripling revenue, achieving profitability ahead of schedule, and increasing market share by nearly nine percentage points. His leadership also contributed to significant cost reductions through organizational integration and earned recognition through the PepsiCo Chairman’s Award.
The ability to diagnose underperformance and create sustainable commercial improvement became a defining strength throughout Jan’s career. At MillerCoors, where he served as Director of Commercial Strategy, he helped shape and implement strategic business plans across major regional markets. His work contributed to substantial revenue growth, market share gains, and incremental operating contribution. Among his achievements, he helped turn around a stagnant Southeast business unit, generating double-digit revenue growth and meaningful market share improvement, while also developing investment models that linked marketing expenditure more directly to market capabilities and financial returns. These experiences strengthened Jan’s expertise in strategic planning, revenue management, portfolio strategy, pricing, resource allocation, and performance optimization.
Jan has also demonstrated a strong entrepreneurial instinct through consulting, emerging businesses, and growth-stage organizations. As President of Waterloo Strategic Consulting, he advised food and beverage manufacturers, importers, exporters, and distributors on strategic planning, interim management, capital raising, valuation, due diligence, and U.S. market entry. His work included helping European brands establish and expand their presence in the United States, including the launch of Belgian beer brands and a Dutch specialty cheese brand into multiple states. This period reinforced his ability to translate European business models into commercially viable propositions for American customers and distribution channels.
At Nature’s Farm Dairy, Jan served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing and played a central role in transforming the company into a nationally recognized premium dairy business. He helped grow annual revenue from zero to approximately $18 million while expanding retail distribution into more than 30 states. In addition to building brand equity and national distribution, Jan helped raise $15 million from private investors to support the company’s growth strategy. His leadership extended beyond traditional sales and marketing into capital formation, intellectual property positioning, international consulting, and strategic preparation for future transactions. He also contributed to the transformation of a related agricultural business, helping drive substantial year-over-year growth and positioning the organization for a successful sale.
Since 2017, Jan has served as Chief Executive Officer of Goat Partners International in the Americas, where he has built and led a business focused on European goat milk powders and specialty dairy ingredients. Under his leadership, the organization has developed relationships across several highly specialized sectors, including human nutrition, pet food, skincare, pharmaceuticals, and specialty food applications. His work has also included portfolio expansion into higher-margin direct-to-consumer opportunities, strategic advisory support for specialty nutrition manufacturing, and involvement in initiatives supporting the clinical trial and FDA approval process for infant formula based on whole goat milk. This role brings together many of the capabilities that have defined Jan’s career: international sourcing, market development, specialty food expertise, business-to-business growth, consumer strategy, commercial leadership, and entrepreneurial execution.
Across his career, Jan has worked with an unusually broad portfolio of food and beverage categories, including dairy, goat milk products, breakfast cereal, cereal bars, bakery mixes, juices, cocktail mixes, freezer pops, carbonated soft drinks, and alcoholic beverages. He has operated across retail, foodservice, convenience, distributor, private-label, and nontraditional channels and has managed relationships with major international customers and partners. His knowledge is equally relevant to business-to-consumer and business-to-business organizations, particularly those seeking growth, market repositioning, category expansion, improved commercial execution, or entry into the U.S. or European markets.
A major differentiator in Jan’s leadership is his international perspective. He has spent approximately half of his career in the United States while maintaining deep professional roots in Europe and conducting business across the Far East, Africa, Russia, Japan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and other international markets. A native Dutch speaker who is also fluent in English and German, conversational in French, and equipped with basic Spanish, Jan understands that international growth requires far more than translating a sales presentation. He recognizes the importance of adapting business models, brands, products, pricing, distribution, negotiations, and leadership approaches to different cultural and commercial environments.
Beyond executive leadership, Jan has contributed his experience through board, advisory, association, and community involvement. His past board service has included the Netherlands Club of Chicago, Nature’s American Company, and Nature’s Hand Cereal Company, complementing his professional work with startups and established organizations. He has also participated in organizations such as the American Culinary Federation’s Chicago Chapter and Chess Without Borders. These experiences reflect a broader interest in community, professional engagement, and using business experience in ways that extend beyond an individual operating role.
As Jan looks toward the next stage of his career, board and advisory service represents a natural continuation of the work he has spent decades performing. After nearly 40 years of professional experience, he brings both historical perspective and practical relevance to organizations facing growth decisions, market expansion, strategic change, leadership challenges, or commercial transformation. He is particularly interested in food and beverage, consumer, and business-to-business organizations and is open to working with companies of varying sizes and stages of development. His motivation is grounded in the belief that accumulated experience becomes most valuable when it can be shared, allowing leadership teams and emerging executives to avoid unnecessary mistakes, accelerate progress, and create lasting success.
Jan’s leadership style combines strategic rigor with a practical, entrepreneurial approach. He is comfortable working at the boardroom level on corporate strategy, market positioning, and long-term planning while remaining equally capable of examining customer relationships, pricing structures, distribution models, sales processes, and commercial execution. He understands how to move between strategy and implementation, and his experience leading businesses through growth, turnaround, expansion, and change allows him to bring a balanced perspective to executive and board-level discussions.
Personally, Jan values continuous contribution, curiosity, and meaningful engagement. His interests include the outdoors, tennis, and golf, reflecting an appreciation for activity, discipline, and connection beyond the workplace. As he transitions toward the later stages of his executive career, his focus is not simply on stepping away from operating leadership, but on finding new ways to contribute. Board and advisory work offers him the opportunity to give back the experience accumulated across industries, continents, organizations, and business cycles while helping others build stronger companies and achieve sustainable success.
Character:
Jan brings an entrepreneurial, grounded, and results-oriented leadership style shaped by decades of responsibility for people, businesses, customers, and investors. He approaches leadership with a strong sense of contribution and believes his experience is most meaningful when it helps other organizations and leaders succeed.
Knowledge:
His expertise spans food, dairy, beverages, consumer products, international business, sales, marketing, business development, general management, P&L leadership, and corporate strategy. His combination of technical food science education, advanced business training, and nearly four decades of international operating experience gives him a broad yet highly practical perspective.
Strategic:
Jan has repeatedly transformed strategy into measurable business performance, from turning around multinational operations to launching new brands, entering new markets, improving profitability, raising capital, and building emerging companies. He is particularly effective at identifying connections between markets, categories, channels, and business models that can reveal new opportunities for growth.
Communication:
A multilingual leader who is comfortable communicating across organizational levels, nationalities, and business cultures. His international leadership experience and comfort with executive and internal presentations allow him to translate complex commercial issues into clear priorities that teams, executives, and board members can act upon.
