with Marc Andre
Head of IT at Heineken UK
Scott McGowan, Senior Technology Consultant in MacGregor Black’s Food & Drink practice, spoke with Marc Andre about a career that began with a floppy disc hand-delivered from Glasgow to Paris and has arrived, three decades later, at the helm of one of the most complex technology functions in European FMCG.
There is a particular kind of candour that only comes from someone who genuinely doesn’t need to impress you. Marc Andre has led technology functions across four countries, overseen ERP transformations on three continents and sat in the rooms where global digital strategy gets made.
And yet the thing he keeps coming back to, with something close to affection, is the one PC. The single computer that connected his Glasgow office to London headquarters in the late 1990s. He mentions it more than once, not as a punchline, but as a reference point, a way of saying, ‘This is how far we’ve come, and I was there for all of it.’
How a military choice became a 30-year career
Marc didn’t choose drinks. Drinks chose him, through a quirk of French national service policy that, in retrospect, reads like fate wearing a bureaucratic disguise.
In France, at the time Marc came of age, military service was compulsory. But there was an alternative route: if you held the right degree, you could serve the French economy by working for a French company or consulate abroad. Marc applied to a handful of large corporations. Pernod Ricard wrote back.
“You come with a solid background, you don’t cost too much, it was a win-win.”
Marc says that with the pragmatic honesty of someone who has no interest in mythologising his own beginnings. The plan was 16 months in Scotland. He would stay with Pernod Ricard for the better part of three decades.
The timing helped. His arrival coincided almost exactly with the Y2K moment, a period of genuine technological urgency across industries, and Pernod Ricard, mid-way through a major SAP implementation, decided to keep him on.
“I said, well, why not.”
And then, as he puts it, he was married and settled, and the company kept offering him reasons to stay and places to go. Scotland gave way to Sydney, where he led technology for the wine division across Australia and New Zealand. Sydney gave way to New York as VP of IT for the world’s largest wine and spirits market. North America gave way to Paris, to the global headquarters, where he helped shape the international technology roadmap at a strategic level. And then, finally, home. Back to Scotland. And a new drinks company, this time with lager where the whisky used to be.
It is a career that could have been planned meticulously. It wasn’t.
“It was more grasping the right opportunities and a bit of luck to be at the right place at the right time.”
The industry that gets under your skin
There is a question that recruiters ask senior leaders often and rarely get a truly interesting answer to: ‘Why have you stayed?’ Marc’s answer is worth sitting with.
Part of it is practical. The pace of acquisition at Pernod Ricard created a continuous wave of technology opportunity. In the 2000s, Pernod Ricard made some major acquisitions to become the world’s #2 wine and spirits organisation. Each acquisition brought new complexity, new systems, new reasons for IT to matter more.
“We went from the very basics, putting a network together, to ERP, then to data and consumer-centric focus.”
The function didn’t just grow; it transformed itself and became progressively more central to how the business operated. But the other part is harder to quantify.
“It is first and foremost a fun industry to be in, making and selling products that bring moments of happiness to people when consumed in moderation.”
What he’s describing is something specific to this industry: the pride that runs through the people who craft these products. Whisky. Wine. Beer. It is visible and contagious in a way that doesn’t exist in, say, financial services or enterprise software.
“Working alongside people who are proud of what they make and sell is something quite unique to this industry. You don’t always get that feeling everywhere.”
The proof, if any were needed, is a detail his wife apparently finds slightly maddening.
“It’s very hard for me to walk into a pub or a restaurant without looking behind the bar to see whether they’re stocking our products.”
Thirty years in, and it still gets him.
From one PC to enterprise architecture: What actually changed?
When Marc talks about technology change, he doesn’t reach for abstractions. He reaches for the floppy disc.
There was a moment, somewhere in the late 1990s, when data needed to travel from Glasgow to Paris. The systems of the era offered no reliable digital route. So, Marc, who was bilingual and available, flew to Paris on a same-day return flight to hand-deliver a disc to the IT or finance team. This, in miniature, is what IT used to look like.
The pace at which technology has since changed has been genuinely staggering across all areas:- cloud computing, ERP, analytics, cybersecurity, agile methodology, modular architecture, and now AI. It is unprecedented, exponential and is really reshaping everyday life as well as industries. Food & Drinks is obviously not immune to these changes. What has shifted is the nature of the function’s authority. IT used to operate as a service provider typically reporting to the Finance function. Today, as Technology is becoming more strategic in most organisations. It has earned a seat at the executive table. Marc is clear-eyed about what that demands:
“If you’re at the table, you can’t just sit and listen. You need to participate, lead, and demonstrate that you understand what that role demands.”
Being a pure technologist is no longer sufficient to be successful; you have to become a business leader as well.
The democratisation of technology is bringing more complexity and changing the role we play as technologists. Some of our engineers at our breweries are now developing code using Claude. Not an IT professional, simply someone with access, curiosity, and a problem to solve.
“We’re no longer the only ones playing in this space.”
Marc says, and the tone is not alarm, but recognition. It changes the nature of the job. This is why enterprise architecture is now a strategic necessity. Someone has to hold the view of the whole. That, increasingly, is what IT leadership means.
Building teams that speak two languages
When Marc talks about talent, he talks about translation.
The team he has built at Heineken UK spans SAP specialists, project managers, cloud and infrastructure, hyperautomation, and enterprise architecture. It is a broad portfolio, and he is direct about what holds it together:
“You need people who are bilingual, in a sense, who can understand where the business wants to go, often advises on what technology can bring to them and translate that into what IT can realistically offer.”
Business engagement capability, he argues, is now as critical as any technical specialism in a large, complex organisation. Without it, you end up with solutions that do not deliver the expected value to the organisation and technology that nobody has been brought along to use.
And on change itself, because no conversation about technology transformation can avoid it, he is characteristically direct.
“People don’t like change. But change is a fact of life.“
He doesn’t dramatise it or try to manage the room. An organisation, he says, is a living organism. It keeps changing. The speed of change in business today is considerable, and the pace will not slow.
“If someone says they’re experiencing change fatigue, if you think that way, you may not be in the right industry.”
The other non-negotiable is support. It sounds unglamorous. It is. But Marc is unequivocal:
“You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your support function isn’t absolutely on point at the right level and the right cost, your credibility evaporates very quickly.”
The beautiful basics, he calls them. They are the foundation on which everything else rests.
Where the opportunity lives now
On the question of where technology is making its biggest impact in drinks and FMCG, Marc doesn’t hedge. The answer is AI, and the scale of the opportunity he describes is not theoretical.
Understanding which products belong in which outlets. Modelling which brands to prioritise in which markets and level of investment to make. Overlaying social data with weather forecasting to time promotions more precisely. Reducing incidents on manufacturing sites. optimising maintenance costs or logistics routes in real time, increasing product personalisation against a backdrop of sustained global supply chain disruption.
“It’s genuinely endless. AI is now at the very forefront of business strategy in this industry.”
He is equally frank that the industry was slow to get here. For a long time, margins were healthy enough that technology didn’t need to be the lever. It was the mid-2000s, when selling product started getting harder, that disciplines like revenue growth management and trade promotion management began to take hold in drinks, years after other large organisations like Pepsi and Coca-Cola had made them standard practice. The industry caught up. Now, with AI, it has a chance to lead.
Marc Andre ends the conversation the way he seems to move through his career: without fanfare and with complete clarity about what actually matters.
“We don’t send people to the moon; we’re selling beer at the end of the day.”
It is a deliberate choice of perspective, not a lowering of standards, but a refusal to let perfectionism crowd out progress. In a more regulated world, you cannot afford to experiment. In drinks, you can. You can take calculated risks, try things, and learn. Marc has spent thirty years doing exactly that, and the industry, improbably, keeps rewarding the approach.
That feels about right.