Director Discover Lead, Snacking

Job Description:

Mars Snacking is building an internal entrepreneurship engine to develop, incubate and scale the next big innovations in Snacking. This role leads the Discover Team, an agile front-end innovation unit focused on identifying and addressing priority consumer pain points. This leader will drive external partnerships to bring fresh ideas and capabilities into the organization, and partner with internal entrepreneurship pods to co-create marketable propositions in current and new categories. The role reports to the Global VP of Portfolio Strategy & Innovation and will have direct visibility to the One Demand Leadership Team.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership: Lead and inspire a cross-functional innovation team (Marketing, Research, Design, Science & Tech) to address key consumer pain points, fostering a startup mindset for agility and experimentation.

Platform Leadership: Own global Consumer Platforms, ensuring innovation starts with meaningful consumer problems, using design thinking and rapid experimentation.

Proposition Development: Transform consumer insights, snacking trends, and emerging technologies into high-potential business concepts, collaborating across internal and external teams to develop and iterate ideas.

Collaboration & Engagement: Partner with Intrapreneurs to co-create and refine propositions, communicate insights to senior leaders, and build a strong internal network to deliver solutions and key learnings.

External Partnerships: Build and maintain relationships with external collaborators (labs, universities, startups, consultancies) to enhance capabilities and accelerate innovation.

Signal Spotting: Use technology, customer-buyer-regional connections and AI to monitor emerging trends and behaviors, enabling early recognition and fast-follow concept development.

Governance & Metrics: Track platform performance, align with enterprise strategy, and use KPIs to measure and improve innovation speed, efficiency, and value.

The Discover team at Mars Snacking unites consumer-centric design, research, and Science & Tech to drive long-term innovation. Its dual mandate is to identify early signals of consumer and competitive trends to inform innovation priorities, and to address key consumer pain points through front-end innovation, developing high-potential propositions for our categories and brands.

Reporting to the Global VP of Portfolio Strategy & Innovation, this role partners with Intrapreneurs and agile teams to develop and launch new propositions. It also builds an external ecosystem (labs, think tanks, universities, consultants) to bring agility, efficiency, and fresh insights, while supervising the Discovery team across Marketing, Research, Design, and technical roles.

This role requires a consumer-obsessed individual with an intuition for weak but meaningful signals, a business leader who can translate pains, needs, and trends into platform-able product concepts, and an influencer capable of persuading other innovation leaders and entrepreneurs with their ideas.

Minimum qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Design or a related field

Preferred qualifications:

• MBA or equivalent degree

Knowledge / Experience

• Minimum of 10+ years of experience in CPG innovation (preferably in Packaged Foods), with a strong track record of creating and commercializing new products, services, or business models.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional teams through the front end of innovation, from identifying insights and trends to concept development and early-stage validation
• Experience working with or within entrepreneurial environments (e.g., startups, venture studios, incubators, or corporate innovation teams).
• Strong background in consumer research, human-centered design thinking and agile methodologies.
• Proven ability to build and manage external partnerships with startups, research institutions, and other innovation partners.
• Experience presenting to, inspiring and influencing senior executives and entrepreneurs

• Work with diverse and talented Associates, all guided by the Five Principles.
• Join a purpose driven company, where we’re striving to build the world we want tomorrow, today.
• Best-in-class learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.
• An industry competitive salary and benefits package, including company bonus.

The base pay range for this position at commencement of employment is between the range listed below, however, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including but not limited to job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position will include variable pay, medical and dental benefits, participation in 401k plan, and paid time off benefits. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an applicant receives an offer of employment.