2021 Executive of the Year Winner: Felicia Hale

Executive of the Year Winner: Felicia Hale, Vice President, Equipment Strategy, Coca-Cola Co. Felicia Hale leads with wisdom and passion. She puts her team first, always bringing a human connection, and understands consumer and customer needs. Hale is responsible for leading the overall equipment strategy for Coca-Cola North America as the vice president of equipment strategy. She is charged with managing the strategy and execution for Coca-Cola Freestyle. The bottler’s dispenser platform offers more than 200 choices for consumers, and serves more than 6 billion drinks per year through 50,000 dispensers located in 30,000 retail and foodservice customer outlets. When Coca-Cola Freestyle launched, it was a disruptive innovation that delivered the best dispensed beverage experience to both customers and consumers of the Coca-Cola brands, Hale says. In an effort to provide a touchless experience for consumers that allowed customers to continue selling Coca-Cola Freestyle beverages and drive revenue during the onset of the pandemic, Hale oversaw the development and launch of Mobile Pour on Freestyle. It allows consumers to pour a Coca-Cola Freestyle drink from their mobile phone without ever touching the dispenser. “The Mobile Pour innovation is an example of how our team was focused on delivering value and brought forward a solution to allow our foodservice customers to continue to operate Freestyle machines in a touchless way,” she says. The ease of Mobile Pour — and the fact that consumers don’t need an app or to share personal data to use it — has led to more than 2 million pours using the technology. This allowed Coca-Cola’s customers to keep their dispensers operational while adhering to local health and safety guidelines.Any challenges the team faced along the way stemmed from the ever-changing dynamic of the pandemic, associates working remotely and the need to move with speed, according to Hale. “Our teams collaborated in an agile way to bring this innovation forward,” she says.Her vision today is to continue to deliver the best dispensed beverage experience to both customers and consumers of the Coca-Cola brands, while continuing to accelerate the platform’s growth and value. She must also continue to stay ahead of the rapid pace of innovation in the marketplace, which is not an easy task. “We have to anticipate the needs of our customers and consumers before they are prevalent, and continue to bring innovation platforms to the market with speed,” Hale says.Career BackgroudHale is a graduate of the University of Miami with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, and now serves on the school’s alumni board of directors. She assumed her current role at Coca-Cola in early 2021, overseeing the Freestyle business and managing the long-term strategy for beverage equipment solutions for the company. Prior to that, she served as the Freestyle commercial strategy leader and has held a variety of commercial and operations roles at the company. Over the past 10 years, Coca-Cola has launched several sparkling brand extensions, accelerated category growth, and has grown revenue and value share under her leadership.Before joining the bottler, she worked at Georgia-Pacific, Novartis and General Mills. In her time at these companies, Hale served in a series of sales, marketing and operations roles and led commercial innovation.

2021 Executive of the Year Winner: Felicia Hale

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Company

Market Segment

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Related Articles

Company

Market Segment