The Promotion
Horizon Family Brands, the organic food portfolio company behind Horizon Organic, Maple Hill Creamery, and Wallaby Organic yogurt, has elevated Scott Wallace to Chief Customer Officer — a newly expanded executive role that consolidates customer strategy, commercial partnerships, and cross-functional sales leadership under a single seat at the top table.
Wallace joined the company in November 2023 as vice president of sales and moved to senior vice president in 2025. In the CCO role, he will align sales, marketing, operations, and brand teams around a unified customer engagement model across retail and commercial channels.
Background and Experience
Wallace brings a resume built across the branded consumer-goods supply chain. Before Horizon Family Brands, he held commercial leadership positions at Danone, Kellogg Company, and Procter & Gamble — organizations with deep foodservice and retail-channel infrastructure — as well as Viega LLC. That breadth of omnichannel and wholesale experience is relevant for an organic dairy and yogurt portfolio that competes across natural, conventional grocery, club, and emerging foodservice channels.
CEO Tyler Holm credited Wallace's "customer-first mindset" and ability to bring cross-functional teams around shared commercial goals. "His deep understanding of our categories, brands, teams, customers and channels will be invaluable as we continue building long-term growth for Horizon Family Brands," Holm said.
For operators and retail buyers, the CCO appointment signals that Horizon Family Brands is centralizing its go-to-market strategy rather than running brand-by-brand channel plays. Organic dairy remains a high-velocity category in both retail and noncommercial foodservice — school nutrition, healthcare, and corporate dining segments have expanded their organic milk and yogurt SKU sets over the past several years as procurement standards tighten around clean-label credentials.
What It Means for the Portfolio
The elevation of a dedicated CCO also reflects the complexity of managing three legacy organic brands simultaneously. Horizon Organic, Maple Hill Creamery, and Wallaby Organic occupy overlapping but distinct positions — conventional organic, grass-fed, and cultured dairy, respectively — and each requires tailored channel and pricing strategies to protect margin and shelf placement.
Wallace holds a systems engineering degree from West Point, an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a master's in organizational leadership from Gonzaga University. He began his career as a U.S. Army officer, reaching the rank of captain. That background in structured operational leadership has become a visible pattern in senior commercial hires across the natural and organic food segment, where complex multi-SKU portfolios and fragmented distributor networks demand both strategic clarity and execution discipline.
For coverage of executive moves and portfolio strategy across the natural and organic grocery segment, see our industry news and food and beverage channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
