Krishnarao S Buddha is a Senior Category Head at Parle Products Pvt Ltd. With over 26 years of experience in the FMCG industry, he oversees Parle’s entire snacks, confectionery, cakes, and rusk portfolio. In his present capacity, Krishnarao is responsible for category building, leading effective teams while streamlining operations and marketing strategies with an objective of enhancing Parle’s market share and exceeding the brand’s revenue and profitability.
With a keen interest in advertising, media management and building brand equity, he has been closely working across teams to constantly drive need-gap identification and spearhead new product launches for the legacy brand. Krishnarao takes a keen interest in developing strategies to turn tables for ailing brands. In the last 20 years at Parle Products, some of Krishnarao’s landmark achievements include the launch of Parle’s Kaccha Mango bite along with Parle’s footprint into the snacking industry with fast growing brands like Chatkeens and Parle’s Wafers.
Over the years, Krishnarao has grown to become one of the key opinion leaders within the industry to drive conversations on marketing, business strategies, advertisement, distribution, sales and creating an influence for the FMCG industry. His unique leadership qualities have been instrumental in driving innovation across the organizations he has worked for such as Uncle Chipps, Maxwell Apparels and Excelcia Foods, resulting in aggressive growth targets being achieved efficiently.
He was awarded the ‘Pitch CMO Award 2021’ a flagship property of the exchange4media Group which was presented by Mirror NOW. A strong believer in work-life balance, Krishnarao enjoys playing word games, reading, watching Bollywood movies and listening to retro music during leisure.