NEW YORK — Michael J. Barkley, who joined Kind Healthy Snacks last fall as president and chief operating officer, has been promoted to chief executive officer. He succeeds Daniel Lubetzky, who has been elevated to executive chairman. Mr. Lubetzky founded Kind in 2004.
Prior to joining Kind last fall, Mr. Barkley was with Pinnacle Foods, where he was president of Boulder Brands from May 2017 to August 2018. While at Pinnacle, he was a chief marketing officer, senior vice-president and general manager of meals and sides, and senior vice-president of Birds Eye Frozen Foods. Prior to Pinnacle, he was vice-president and general manager of healthy beverages at Campbell Soup Co. He began his career as a senior product manager at Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, Inc.
In addition to Mr. Barkley’s promotion, Kind announced several other leadership changes.
Succeeding Mr. Barkley as c.o.o. will be Daniel Poland. Mr. Poland brings to the company a broad range of experience in supply chain leadership, financial management and research and development, most recently as executive vice-president and chief supply chain officer at Pinnacle Foods. He earlier was senior vice-president of supply chain at WhiteWave Foods. Prior to that, he held various positions at the former H.J. Heinz Co., including North American chief supply chain officer, vice-president of Heinz North American manufacturing and tomato seed business, vice-president of dry manufacturing, director of food service operations and factory manager. Mr. Poland began his career with Gerber and Nestle in various roles in R.&D., engineering and operations management.
Doug Behrens has been named chief customer officer. Prior to joining Kind, Mr. Behrens was president of Amplify Snack Brands since October 2018. He earlier was chief customer officer at Amplify. He also has worked as president of sales and chief customer officer for both Danone and WhiteWave Foods. He began his career at Johnson & Johnson, holding a variety of v.p. roles.
Rebecca Bagin has been named chief human resources officer. Ms. Bagin has experience building scalable H.R. practices both within food and founder-led spaces. She most recently was chief human resources officer at Tory Burch and earlier spent 14-and-a-half years at Campbell Soup Co. in a variety of H.R. roles. Ms. Bagin also has worked in H.R. positions at JPMorgan Chase, PepsiCo, Inc., Reebok and ExxonMobil.
“These appointments come at an incredibly exciting time for Kind as we seek to bolster our leadership in our current categories, while also entering new categories and rapidly expanding our global footprint,” Mr. Barkley said. “We believe these additions to our leadership team will help us achieve our vision of becoming a foremost global health and wellness leader.”