At a Glance (China Coffee Network): In November 2024, Rafael Oliveira took over coffee giant JDE Peet’s and immediately booked a flight rather than announce any strategy. Eighteen months later, Heineken nominated him as its next CEO—the first external hire in the brewer’s 161-year history—tasking a coffee man with rescuing a beer giant whose volumes are falling.
In November 2024, Rafael Oliveira, who had just taken the helm of coffee giant JDE Peet’s, did not announce any strategy as his first act—he booked a flight.
In the more than 100 days that followed, he flew to the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia. He visited not only offices but also factories and R&D centers. Wherever he went, Oliveira held meetings large and small, and conducted more than 100 one-on-one conversations.
Three months later (February 2025), reviewing this experience at the company’s results meeting, he called it “taking the company’s pulse.” After the visits ended, he launched a big review covering 15 topics, screening out the few opportunities worth massive resource investment. He later named these opportunities “big bets.”
A year and a half later, this experience took on new meaning.
On June 23, Heineken announced it had nominated Oliveira as the company’s next CEO and chairman of the executive board. If the shareholders’ meeting approves, he will officially take office in October 2026.
This is the first time since its founding in 1864 that Heineken has hired its top leader from outside. A career manager who spent only a year and a half in the coffee industry and had never run an alcohol-beverage business is about to take over a beer giant that is laying off staff.
Heineken is not a company in crisis; it remains the world’s second-largest brewer, with brands such as Heineken, Amstel, Birra Moretti, Tiger, and Desperados under its umbrella; Heineken Silver performs strongly in Asia, and Heineken 0.0 remains the global representative of non-alcoholic beer.
But Heineken does face intractable problems: beer is not selling like it used to. In 2025, Heineken’s total volume fell 1.2%. The Americas and European markets were weak, while Asia-Pacific and Africa and the Middle East provided a hedge.
The first externally hired CEO
Heineken’s former CEO Dolf van den Brink unexpectedly announced his resignation in January 2026, ending a six-year tenure. He stayed on until the end of May; from early June, Heineken was left without a permanent CEO, with the executive team keeping operations running and the CFO speaking externally.
Heineken is a beer company with more than 150 years of history, strongly family-colored, long accustomed to cultivating leaders internally. That it suddenly brought in an external CEO—and a consumer-products manager from the coffee industry—is itself a signal.
Oliveira, now 51 and Brazilian, started his career in finance; from 1996 to 2002 he worked as an equity research analyst in Brazil; from 2004 to 2014 he spent a full decade at Goldman Sachs, part of it as managing director for Asian emerging-market business in Hong Kong.
From 2014 he entered the consumer-goods industry, spending ten years at Kraft Heinz. Oliveira rose from managing director for Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea to president of international markets, managing a business portfolio spanning Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America with revenue exceeding USD 7 billion.
During that time, Kraft Heinz was run in the 3G Capital style of extreme cost control; that methodology emphasizing discipline, efficiency, and returns later left a clear imprint on him.
In November 2024, Oliveira became CEO of JDE Peet’s. This was his first time as the top executive of a listed company, and the only tenure from which his leadership style can be observed.
Only this tenure was a bit short; capital maneuvers rewrote it. In 2025, U.S. beverage giant Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP) launched a takeover of JDE Peet’s. Afterward, the Amsterdam-listed coffee company was delisted and became KDP’s coffee business unit.
KDP plans to spin off the coffee business and relist it, with Oliveira leading Global Coffee, with annual revenue of about USD 16 billion, for an earliest listing in 2027; but before that, Heineken poached him.
Judged only by the financial results of this year and a half, Oliveira delivered a beautiful report card.
JDE Peet’s full-year 2025 performance: organic sales growth of 15.3%, total sales approaching EUR 9.921 billion; adjusted EBIT rose 1.2% to about EUR 1.3 billion. Considering that coffee-bean prices hit historic highs that year and total cost inflation related to raw materials reached about EUR 1.6 billion, such a performance was hard-won.
Something more telling than the numbers was the personal style he displayed at the results meeting.
At the February 2025 results meeting, instead of warm-up vision talk, he itemized the company’s ailments. He assessed the company’s coffee-store business as “we have never been good operators”; some past acquisitions “did not deliver as planned,” and he made clear that future M&A would be “super picky, super strict,” avoiding “those bad capital-allocation decisions of the past.”
He criticized JDE Peet’s for operating in China through four separate, non-connected entities, each going its own way. He summed up the company’s core disease as loss of focus: “when you fight too many wars and chase too many opportunities, resource allocation is not optimal.”
Analysts present noticed this unusual candor; during the Q&A an analyst commented, “this is an interesting discussion about what the company did wrong and how to do it right.”
At the time, the direction Oliveira set for JDE Peet’s boiled down to a few words: focus, prioritize, press resources onto a few bets; built around three “big bets” led by local brands Peet’s, L’OR, and Jacobs; paired with a cost plan to save EUR 500 million by 2032.
JDE Peet’s sold its loss-making Turkish tea business, stopped the rollout of the L’OR Barista coffee machine in the U.S., transferred the U.S. L’OR capsule business to Peet’s, and closed the Banbury, UK factory. These moves had little romance to them, like prescriptions after a physical exam: wherever it does not make money, is complex, or is duplicated, start there.
Oliveira’s iron rule on finance is to defend gross-profit amount, not cling to volume. His logic: pass the portion of inflation that cannot be absorbed by efficiency and productivity on to retail and food-service channels through price increases. He firmly believes in the low elasticity of coffee demand: consumers will not drink less of their home cup just because of a price rise.
Taking JDE Peet’s pretty report card apart, how did the 15.3% organic sales growth come about? Price effect +19.5%, volume/mix -4.3%. That is, growth was almost entirely propped up by price increases; real volume was actually falling. In the low-elasticity coffee category, this playbook can hold, and squeezing out a positive 1.2% adjusted EBIT growth was already the result of pricing discipline and productivity programs working together.
Only now Oliveira is about to face a different battlefield: Heineken.
Coffee and beer
Beer has higher demand elasticity than coffee. Young people drink less, fat-reduction goals suppress alcohol consumption, and consumers in mature markets are extremely price-sensitive. Heineken falls into the same structure as JDE Peet’s but a more severe volume-price divergence.
For full-year 2025, Heineken’s total volume fell 1.2% (consolidated volume down 2.1%), net revenue grew only 1.6%, net revenue per hectoliter rose 3.8%—again a story of revenue driven by pricing and mix rather than volume. Adjusted operating profit rose 4.4%, with margin expanding 41 basis points to 15.2%.
The decency on the profit side cannot hide the softness on the volume side.
This softness is not a one- or two-quarter fluctuation. Take Q3 2025 as an example: Heineken beer volume fell 4.3% organically, with Europe and the Americas both contracting; one Americas region saw net revenue fall 5.5% and beer volume fall 7.4%, and Brazil was also dragged down by inventory adjustments and a weakening market.
It was in that same week that Heineken announced it would accelerate digitalization and reshape the organization, with large layoffs at its Amsterdam headquarters—the starting point of a later, larger layoff plan. In its full-year 2026 results, Heineken explicitly guided: it will cut 5,000 to 6,000 positions over the next two years and expects 2026 operating-profit growth of 2%–6%, below its historical 4%–8% range.
Put another way, Heineken brought in Oliveira betting precisely that he had just fought the same battle in another industry. The two companies’ situations are similar: mature category, volume under pressure, revenue maintained by pricing and mix, both advancing cost plans, both laying off and simplifying organizations.
What Heineken wants is someone familiar with this predicament and proven able to steady the profits.
Yet beneath the similarity hides a crack: at JDE Peet’s, Oliveira steadied the situation through price increases; he has yet to prove he can drive real volume growth in an environment without price hikes. And that is precisely what Heineken’s EverGreen 2030 strategy most wants—management has repeatedly reiterated in multiple venues the goal of letting volume growth outrun the industry.
An operator known for pricing is being asked to solve a volume problem that pricing cannot solve; the mismatch in between is not directly underwritten by past performance.
There is another contradiction, hidden in Heineken’s own repeatedly emphasized “strategy unchanged.”
During the CEO vacuum, Heineken’s official tone was unusually unified: the EverGreen 2030 strategy does not waver. The CFO said at March’s UBS conference to investors, “Internally, now is not the time to start questioning the strategy; we have a very good strategy, and the executive team is landing it.”
In its full-year results Heineken specifically described how to accelerate execution of this strategy: focus resources, differentiate for growth, replicate the mature Heineken brand model onto more global brands.
This is a narrative emphasizing continuity and execution according to the established strategy. Yet Oliveira’s approach at JDE Peet’s was exactly the opposite. On taking office he re-prioritized, named and criticized the old strategy, launched a 15-topic comprehensive physical exam, and then personally rolled out a brand-new brand strategy.
Now Heineken says on one hand “we look forward to him accelerating EverGreen 2030 execution,” and on the other calls him bringing “a fresh perspective, inspiring and leading the existing executive team”—these two statements have a subtle internal contradiction: is he to execute a strategy someone else set, or be set free to diagnose first and then operate, as he did at the coffee company?
The answer will not be revealed until after October.
Reprint Notice & Disclaimer: This article is reprinted from “Yongliu Business”, authored by Li Wei and published via 36Kr, with editorial compilation by China Coffee Network. All rights belong to the original publisher. If you believe any content infringes your rights, please contact us for removal.
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