Name: Unilever CEO on Why 'Strategy Is the Art of Sacrifice'
Uploaded: 2026-07-02T11:00:00Z
Duration: 2 min 14 s
Description: Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez explains why making tough choices is essential to corporate leadership—and details the strategy behind the company's recent decision to spin off its ice cream division.

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Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez explains why making tough choices is essential to corporate leadership—and details the strategy behind the company's recent decision to spin off its ice cream division. Photo: Anna Moffat for the WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260626/6e450e3c-56f0-44f2-93fa-fe41302d5138/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez explains why making tough choices is essential to corporate leadership—and details the strategy behind the company's recent decision to spin off its ice cream division.

Unilever CEO on Why 'Strategy Is the Art of Sacrifice'

Let's take a very specific example to explore that, ice cream out the door.

Yeah.

Both because it was not performing but also because it didn't really have synergies with the rest of the portfolio.

I feel ice cream is a category that is a fundamentally out-of-home channel with significant personality, high capital intensity. It's very different to categories like home care, personal care or beauty. So that's a clear example of a category that didn't have significant complementarity with our portfolio and require complete different capabilities and requires a business model that is tailor-made for that kind of company. So that's the reason that we separate the ice cream around one and a half year ago.

Yep. Do you miss it? Did you have a favorite flavor or are you a Chunky Monkey fan or?

I love Magnum and some of our best innovation has been in the ice cream category. Some of our best brands are there. But a strategy is the art of sacrifice and if you don't make tough choices, if you don't suffer when you make some of these choices, probably you are not really having a strategy. So we miss ice cream. I miss it at every dessert time, but we are really confident in the decision that we have.

And perhaps more significantly, you've made the decision to get rid of all the food and merge it into McCormick. Can you talk about that decision?

Yeah, we announced on the end of March the combination of our food business with McCormick. We are creating a large global flavor powerhouse of $20 billion revenue. I believe it's a company that will fundamentally have a scale and focus that is very difficult to find in the food industry. We believe we are building a fabulous company in foods and at the same time, we are really making Unilever a pure play home care, personal care company that are sectors in which we believe the competency that the company has in terms of innovation, science, consumer understanding, key consumer dynamic fit better with our capabilities. So that's the reason of this big transaction. It's the fourth largest transaction in the history of consumer goods, and we will close it in one year or so.

The WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders. A new podcast series bringing you revealing conversations with top executives shaping business today. Hosted by Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, the series goes beyond headlines to explore how leadership really works in times of upheaval, transformation, and uncertainty. Our first episode was released Monday, Sept. 22, at 5:00 a.m. ET, with new episodes every other Monday.