A highly accomplished CEO in the global food industry, Peder Tuborgh has dedicated his career to delivering long-term value and opportunities for Arla Foods’ farmer owners while meeting consumers’ needs for nutritious, affordable and more sustainable dairy products through inspiring brands.
Peder Tuborgh is CEO at the cooperative dairy group Arla Foods, a global business that provides dairy products and ingredients based on milk supplied by 10,300 farmer owners in Northern Europe.
He is a firm believer that progressive and financially robust farmers are essential to solving what is probably the food industry’s biggest challenge: to provide nutritious, affordable and more sustainable food to a global population that will reach almost 10 billion citizens in 2050. Not only will farmers need to produce more milk, they will also have to develop their farming methods to become more sustainable, while maintaining high standards for milk quality and animal welfare. Long-term financial stability is the prerequisite for farmers to actively participate in this challenge. As CEO for a farmer-owned dairy company it is a key priority for Peder to deliver the highest possible price for Arla’s farmer owners’ milk through a strong performance across the business.
Always eager to continually improve and explore opportunities for growth, he constantly stretches his organisation to reach its full potential. He has launched and delivered timely, ambitious growth strategies that have pushed the group to its next level. As a result, Arla Foods has initiated and implemented a number of big cooperative mergers, entered new markets in the world’s emerging regions, heavily invested in supply chain, innovation and branding, all the while maintaining a proactive efficiency agenda.
Under his leadership, the company has almost doubled its turnover and evolved from a Scandinavian organisation to a global dairy company with farmer owners in seven Northern European countries, an annual milk intake of 14 billion kilos and sales in more than 120 markets.
While building a performance-oriented culture, Peder has also personally invested in making Arla Foods a much more value-driven company. By introducing and activating the company’s vision, mission and Good Growth identity, he has motivated farmer owners and colleagues to continuously increase focus on nutrition, naturalness, sustainability and transparency.
Peder holds a MSc in Economics and Business Administration from Odense University. Since joining Arla Foods in 1987, he has progressively worked his way up through senior management positions. Firstly through marketing roles in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Denmark, and later through general management roles such as Divisional Director and Group Executive Director with responsibility for the Nordic markets. In 2005, he became CEO of Arla Foods aged 42, the youngest CEO in the company’s history.
Peder was born in 1963. He is married and the father of four daughters and a son.
