New CEO for Milcobel

Belgian dairy cooperative Milcobel has found a successor to CEO Nils van Dam: Peter Grugeon will take over the helm on 1 July. He has extensive expertise in the food sector.

Experience in dairy

With Grugeon, Milcobel brings in an experienced manager: the bio-engineer held various management positions both domestically and internationally at Greenyard, Puratos and Vandemoortele, among others. He also carried out a thorough transformation at dairy company Inex.

Grugeon is expected to both bring calm and take bold decisions, Milcobel’s press release states. “Peter’s dairy experience is a strong asset. He understands the challenges facing both dairy farming and the dairy sector today. Thanks to his diverse functions, Peter has a good understanding of the complexity of the entire chain and brings not only commercial but also operational experience”, chairwoman Betty Eeckhaut says.

Efficient organisation

“As far as I am concerned, we have to run a cooperative like a family business. We have to turn over every stone to ensure that we end up with a good bottom-line result and make enough profit to effectively offer our members added value. A market-based milk price is the basis for this. But if we also want to give more back to our members, this is only possible if we are an efficient organisation, where we strive to maximise our result just like any other company”, the new CEO indicates.

Early this year, Milcobel ended the cooperation with its CEO Nils van Dam because of “a clear difference in vision”.