Guntas Randhawa exits Hindustan Unilever after 17 years

MUMBAI: Corporate farewells are usually forgettable, a paragraph of gratitude and a stock photo. Guntas Randhawa’s exit from Unilever after 17 years is not that. It reads instead like a short thesis on what marketing leadership has quietly become: less about market-share charts and more about understanding, in her own words, “why someone reaches for one product and walks past another.”

The career underneath that sentiment is a genuinely comprehensive tour of how fast-moving consumer goods actually gets built and sold in India. Randhawa joined Unilever as a business leadership trainee in 2009, then spent three and a half years as customer development manager for modern trade across Delhi NCR, leading a team of more than 200 HUL and third-party employees while crafting joint business plans with regional distributors and retailers. She was recognised for the highest quarterly growth plan delivery nationally across three consecutive years, 2010, 2011 and 2012, and picked up the CEO Compass award for best channel performance in 2011, an early sign that she could turn field execution into measurable results rather than just activity.

From there she moved into brand management for nearly six years, running campaigns and trade promotions and managing a genuinely wide stakeholder network across supply chain, production, legal and R&D, work that earned her awards for best brand deployment and best use of traditional media in 2014. The next chapter took her global: four years as global brand director leading innovation roll outs customised for South Asia, South East Asia and Africa, spanning everything from proposition development to fragrance evaluation to market-specific brand experience toolkits. That is the kind of cross-market, cross-function brief that tests whether a marketer can operate beyond a single country’s playbook, and Randhawa clearly could.

Her final assignment, and arguably the most commercially significant, was building out an entirely new category almost from scratch. As India head for Unilever’s vitamins, minerals and supplements division since January 2023, she was tasked with scaling a business in one of the fastest-growing corners of Indian consumer health, a segment where global majors and sharp digital-first challengers are competing hard for the same shelf space and search results. Her own professional headline, focused on scaling health and wellness brands, supplements and premium digital-first growth with proven profit and loss ownership, suggests this was where she found her sharpest edge.

What makes the exit note worth reading beyond the sentiment is the framing itself. Randhawa credits the people and the failures as much as the wins, and closes not with nostalgia but with intent: “Onwards, curious, grateful, and ready for the next adventure.” For an executive who has spent 17 years moving from sales execution to global brand strategy to building a new category leg, that combination of P&L ownership and genuine category-building experience in health and wellness makes her next move worth watching closely, particularly for any digital-first wellness or supplements brand looking for a leader who has already done the hard, unglamorous work of scaling from zero inside a giant.