How to Hire a COO for a Growing Food & Beverage Company

A COO is the most consequential hire a food and beverage founder makes, and the one most likely to be made for the wrong reason. Done right, it gives you back your calendar and tightens the whole business. Done wrong, you've handed half your company to someone who doesn't fit, and untangling that takes a year.

I get the COO question more than almost any other. It usually arrives the same way: a founder who built the brand is now drowning in operations, and they want to hire someone to "run the business" so they can get back to the work only they can do. That instinct is right. The execution is where most founders go sideways.

Here's how I think about hiring a COO in food and beverage — when you're actually ready, what the role should own, what it costs, and how to run the search so the hire sticks.

The Signs You Actually Need a COO

The wrong reason to hire a COO is that you're tired. The right reason is that operational complexity has outrun any one person's ability to hold it. Those feel the same from the inside, so look for the specific signals.

You're ready when the day-to-day has crowded out the strategic. When you spend your week chasing co-man issues, expediting POs, and refereeing between functions instead of working on brand, channel strategy, and capital. When five functions report to you and nobody connects them. When your team has good ideas but execution keeps slipping. And, in our world specifically, when the operational surface area — co-packers, distributors, retailers, food safety, fulfillment — has grown faster than your org chart.

There's no magic revenue number, but in food and beverage the need usually surfaces somewhere between $15M and $75M, because that's when co-manufacturing, distribution, and retail complexity compound at once. If you're earlier than that and just overworked, you may need a strong VP of Operations or a great planner, not a COO. Scaling brands churn leaders fastest when they hire a title to fix a problem the title doesn't actually solve.

Get Honest About Why You're Hiring One

The best thinking on this is still the Harvard Business Review piece "Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer." The authors interviewed dozens of COOs and CEOs and found there is no universal COO job description. Companies hire a COO for one of several distinct reasons: to execute the CEO's strategy, to lead a specific initiative like a turnaround, to complement the CEO's weaknesses, to act as a true partner, or to test a possible successor.

A COO search fails before it starts when the founder can't say which of those reasons they're hiring for. The reason defines the person. Get specific first.

This matters because the COO who's a great execution engine for your strategy is a different human than the operator you bring in to fix manufacturing, who is different again from the seasoned number-two you hire as a potential successor. Pick the reason, write it down, and let everything else flow from it.

What a Food & Beverage COO Really Owns

In our industry, the COO generally owns everything that turns product into delivered, profitable revenue. That means manufacturing or co-manufacturing, supply chain and procurement, quality and food safety, logistics and fulfillment, and usually demand planning and S&OP. Often customer service and, depending on the founder, parts of finance and HR.

The job is not to run a function brilliantly. It's to run the operating system that connects the functions, so the business scales without margin or service levels falling apart. McKinsey has written about how the COO role has expanded well beyond back-office operations into a strategic, cross-functional seat — and in a physical-product business like food and beverage, that's exactly the gap a good one fills.

COO vs. VP of Operations

This is the distinction founders blur most. A VP of Operations runs a function and executes against a plan. A COO owns the plan across functions, sits on the leadership team as your partner, and is often a candidate to grow into a president or CEO. If you need one function run well, hire a VP and save the equity. If you need someone to own how the whole business operates and genuinely free you up, you need a COO. Tell us which problem you're solving and we'll tell you straight which role it is.

Define the Outcomes Before You Define the Person

Before you write a job description or talk to a single candidate, write down what this person must have accomplished by day 90, day 180, and the end of year one. Not responsibilities — outcomes. "Stand up a weekly S&OP process and cut stockouts to under two percent." "Renegotiate the two largest co-man agreements and pull 300 basis points out of cost of goods." "Get fill rate to 98 percent across the top five retail accounts."

If you can't write those outcomes, you're not ready to hire — because there's no way to tell a strong candidate from a smooth-talking one. The outcomes become your scorecard, your interview structure, and your first-year review. They also force the conversation with your candidate about what's actually realistic, which is where you learn the most about how they think.

What to Look For (and What to Ignore)

Ignore brand-name resumes that don't match your stage. A COO who scaled a $2B company through layers of staff and capital has rarely done the hands-on, resource-constrained work your $40M brand needs. The skill of operating with abundance is not the skill of operating with constraints.

Look for someone who has operated at the stage you're entering next, not the one you're leaving. Look for real food and beverage scar tissue — co-man transitions, a recall or a near-miss, a distributor change, a capacity crunch during peak season. Look for someone who makes your team better, because a COO who can't develop people just becomes another bottleneck. And look hard at how they handle the founder relationship, because that partnership is the whole job. The HBR research is blunt about it: what makes a great COO depends entirely on the CEO.

A resume tells you what someone managed. It doesn't tell you how they think under pressure, which is the only thing that predicts whether they'll succeed in your seat. That's why every candidate we present comes with a full written evaluation — motivations, leadership style, and an honest read on where they're strong and where they're not — not just a one-page summary.

What a COO Costs

COO pay is one of the most variable executive figures in the market, so anchor to real data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median wage of about $206,420 for chief executives as of May 2024, and COO compensation clusters around that range. In practice I see emerging food and beverage brands land a COO between roughly $175,000 and $250,000 in base, climbing past $300,000 in base plus bonus at larger companies, with a meaningful performance bonus tied to margin and service metrics — and equity at venture-backed brands.

Don't anchor on base alone. The total package, the bonus structure, and the equity are what actually win an operator who has options. If you want to pressure-test a specific number for your stage and market, our executive compensation calculator is built for exactly this, and our 2026 F&B and CPG hiring trends report covers where comp is moving this year.

The Bottom Line

Hiring a COO in food and beverage isn't really an operations decision. It's a decision about how you want to spend the next three years of your life as a founder, and who you trust to run the machine while you build the brand.

Get the reason right, define the outcomes before the person, look for an operator who fits your stage and not your ego, and pay for the partnership you actually need. Do that, and the right COO is the highest-leverage hire you'll ever make. Skip it, and you'll spend a year learning why the role is the one founders most often get wrong.