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Inside Sudharshana Sathianathan’s two decade climb from Unilever’s brand desks to Nestlé’s boardroom, and the calculated risks that got her there.
Ask Sudharshana Sathianathan what has driven her career, and the answer has nothing to do with a plan. It has to do with a refusal to sit still, a refusal that has taken her from brand desks to boardrooms, and cost her more comfort than most people would willingly give up.
Today she is Head of Modern Trade at Nestlé Lanka, the multinational’s chosen steward for how its products are fought for, priced, and displayed across the country’s supermarkets and e-grocery apps. On paper, it reads as the endpoint of a conventional FMCG career. In conversation, it reads as the latest chapter in a twenty year habit of doing the thing everyone advised against.
From Brand Desk to Shop Floor
Sathianathan’s career began in brand management, first at Unilever on legacy names like the Astra spread and Laojee tea. It was comfortable and safe there, which is precisely why her move to Hemas, a local conglomerate, drew what she describes as an audible gasp in the room.
At Hemas she was handed the hair care category, then within six months asked to step up to Baby Care, the company’s flagship FMCG business. After having her children and a stint in fragrance and male grooming, she moved into Head of Sales for Modern Trade in 2016, a leap into a heavily male dominated, “hardcore sales function.” The room’s response was not encouraging.
“You’re a brand marketer, not a salesperson.” “It’s a male-dominated department, they’ll never respect a female boss.” “If you fail, you’ll set back women in sales for years.”
She took the job anyway. What emerged from that stretch became a throughline for the rest of her career: the conviction that marketing and sales are two halves of the same engine.
“Sales without brand discipline is just tactical discounting, and marketing without commercial rigor is just a creative exercise.”
That conviction carried her through three years running Modern Trade, then a pivot to Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager at Jagro Strawberries, cut short by the pandemic. A career break followed, then a return as Group Head of Sales for Modern Trade at Maliban Biscuits, where she relisted Zellers chocolates after a twenty year market absence. She eventually landed at Nestlé, a move that felt less like a departure than a natural progression into a structure built on global category discipline.
Renting Real Estate, Not Selling Products
Ask Sathianathan what outsiders get wrong about Modern Trade and she doesn’t hesitate: people imagine it as a straightforward supply chain. The reality, she argues, is closer to commercial real estate.
“You don’t just sell to a retailer. You rent space from them. Every inch of shelf, every end cap, every checkout lane is evaluated on yield per square foot.”
Eye level costs money, because, as she puts it, eye level is buy level. Miss an On-Time, In-Full delivery window with a major account, and the fines and lost shelf allocation can dent a quarterly margin overnight. Winning shelf space means walking into a retailer’s office with data on cross shopping behaviour and footfall trends, making the case that a brand will grow the entire category, not just its own line. That same instinct now steers Nestlé’s push into digital commerce, an area she also leads.
The First Woman in the Room
Sathianathan holds a distinction twice over: first female Group Head of Modern Trade at Maliban, and later first female Head of Modern Trade at Nestlé. She treats it less as an achievement than a description of the terrain crossed, a commercial arena where deals were traditionally closed after hours rather than in a boardroom.
She has also judged the National Sales Awards, run by the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing, since 2019. Weak campaigns, she says, lean on tactical discounting for short term volume. Strong ones are built on shopper insight, hold their margins, and show sustained post campaign performance: market share gained, new shoppers won.
The Comfort Trap
“The biggest mistake I ever made wasn’t taking a risk that failed. It was getting comfortable,” Sathianathan says. She describes the trap that catches high achieving working mothers: the point where the routine finally works and the temptation is to stop reaching. The balance she’d settled for, she now believes, was never a real win. That philosophy explains her own biggest gamble too, stepping back from the corporate ladder at the peak of her career to focus on her children, before returning to full time leadership by 2024.
Off the Clock
Sathianathan began training in Bharatanatyam at four and won the President’s Award for classical dance at eighteen. The discipline of Abhinaya, facial expression and gesture, gave her both a poker face and a sharp read on a room. She also served three years as President of the Past Pupils’ Association of Holy Family Convent, Bambalapitiya. Family, she says, made every leap possible, and she closes by borrowing her old school’s motto: glory be to God alone.
