Kraft Heinz has appointed Lucy Hovey as chief financial officer for its UK & Ireland business, giving finance oversight of a manufacturing base anchored by Kitt Green in Wigan, Europe's largest food manufacturing facility, at a time when the plant is midway through a major decarbonisation and capacity investment programme.

Hovey succeeds Darren De Vires, who departs after eight years, and brings more than two decades of finance leadership experience across consumer goods, including 13 years at Unilever, most recently as CFO for Unilever UK & Ireland's Personal Care business and finance lead for Deodorants and Skin Cleansing across Europe.

In her new role, Hovey will oversee the UK and Ireland's finance function, setting financial strategy and multi-year plans across a business whose flagship site, Kitt Green, produces around 1.3 billion cans of food annually, including Heinz Beanz, soups and pasta, and employs approximately 850 people.

Marta Pilczuk, managing director for Kraft Heinz UK & Ireland, said Hovey's track record partnering with commercial teams to deliver profitable, sustainable growth would be valuable as the business builds momentum, and thanked De Vires for his contribution. Hovey said she was joining a business with iconic brands and real momentum, and was looking forward to building on that with the wider team.

Kraft Heinz, a US food and beverage group, operates its largest UK site at Kitt Green, where a previous £140m investment brought sauce manufacturing back to the UK and where the company is now developing a £40m green hydrogen project to cut the plant's carbon emissions.

The appointment reflects a wider pattern among large food manufacturers of recruiting finance leaders with cross-category commercial experience to oversee capital-intensive decarbonisation and modernisation programmes at flagship sites, rather than purely accounting-focused CFOs.

For the sector, continuity of investment at sites such as Kitt Green depends heavily on finance leadership prioritising multi-year manufacturing capex, including energy transition projects like the site's planned green hydrogen plant, over shorter-term margin protection.

The wider signal for the sector is that as major UK food manufacturing sites undertake multi-year decarbonisation and modernisation programmes, the finance function is becoming as central to delivery as engineering and operations teams.

Source: Food Manufacture / Manufacturing Digital