CPG Marketing Recruiters for Brands That Sell on the Shelf and Online
We recruit the brand managers, eCommerce leads, Amazon account managers and sourcing people a growing consumer brand ends up needing, often in the same year.
KORE1’s CPG recruiters hire for the brand, eCommerce and commercial seats at consumer brands, from brand managers and eCommerce directors to Amazon account managers, partnerships leads and the sourcing people behind the product.
Last updated: October 16, 2026
The shelf keeps getting more crowded. The federal count of soft drink manufacturing locations rose 22.2% from 2022 to 2025, while the number of people working in that industry rose 4.5%. More brands. Not many more people.
If you’re hiring for a consumer brand, those two numbers are the whole problem. Every new label needs someone to run its Amazon store, someone to own the brand and someone who knows how a co-packer actually works, and the brand down the street is calling the same short list you are.
- This desk
- Marketing and commercial hiring for consumer brands. Brand and marketing leadership, eCommerce and direct-to-consumer, Amazon and marketplace, partnerships, and the sourcing and contract manufacturing seats that keep product on the shelf.
- Next door
- Storefront and platform engineering for online retailers goes to e-commerce staffing. Formulation and product development go to our food science recruiters, and planning and logistics to supply chain staffing.
Consumer brand searches sit with the KORE1 marketing recruiters, and Samantha Litman takes the senior ones personally. She’s spent 25-plus years hiring marketers and creatives, and a few of her favorite searches landed right where two industries overlap.
The Planogram CPG Recruiters Work From
A planogram is the drawing that tells a store where every product sits and how many facings it gets. This one stocks the industries consumer brands hire from and counts each of them twice, once by the locations it runs and once by the people who work there.
U.S. private industry, 2025 against 2022
One facing is 10% of the 2022 count
- On the shelf in 2022
- Added since 2022
- Gone since 2022
Locations
+22.2%
Jobs
+4.5%
Soft drink manufacturingNAICS 312111. Sodas, energy drinks and other soft drinks
Locations1,187 to 1,450
Jobs79,804 to 83,409
Avg pay$75,762
Locations grew almost five times faster than jobs. New brands, same bench.
Locations
+6.5%
Jobs
+1.4%
Beverage manufacturingNAICS 3121. Soft drinks, water, beer, wine and spirits
Locations15,319 to 16,316
Jobs312,676 to 316,938
Avg pay$62,853
Locations
+10.2%
Jobs
+5.0%
Food manufacturingNAICS 311. Snacks, dairy, bakery, meat and the rest of the center store
Locations38,817 to 42,763
Jobs1,690,999 to 1,775,008
Avg pay$63,416
Locations
+5.7%
Jobs
−8.2%
Cosmetics and personal careNAICS 325620, toilet preparation manufacturing. Skincare, hair care, makeup, fragrance
Locations1,757 to 1,857
Jobs59,242 to 54,384
Avg pay$81,072
Locations
+5.3%
Jobs
+3.5%
Every private industryAll of it, for comparison
Locations11.2M to 11.8M
Jobs128.7M to 133.2M
Avg pay$79,094
Source: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2022 and 2025 annual averages, U.S., private ownership. A location is one establishment, a single plant, office or warehouse, so one brand can run several, and a brand that pays a co-packer to make everything may be counted under another code entirely. Average pay covers every job in the industry, plant floor included.
Read the top shelf first. Soft drink makers went from 1,187 locations to 1,450, and the whole industry added 3,605 jobs to staff all of them. That shelf holds the energy drinks and the functional sodas, and every label on it needs a marketer. Beverage overall looks the same at a bigger scale, with locations up 6.5% and jobs up 1.4%.
The beauty shelf is the odd one. Cosmetics and personal care makers added 100 locations and lost 4,858 jobs, an 8.2% drop, and they still pay more per job than anything else on the drawing, so every hire there carries more weight than it used to.
So what do you do with it?
Assume the person you want is hearing from two or three other brands a lot like yours. Move quickly, be precise about the seat, and sell the stage you’re at, because someone leaving a big packaged goods company for a young brand is trading structure for ownership and wants to know you understand the trade. One warning about the codes. They count workplaces and workers across whole industries, plant floor and all, so read the drawing as a map of where competition for people is rising, not as a salary survey for marketing roles.
Why One CPG Hire Turned Into Six
This one predates Samantha’s time at KORE1. She was one of several recruiters pitching a gaming and consumer beverage brand that had just raised money. The seat they cared about most was a Director of eCommerce. It had been open a while.
She filled it fast. Then the brand kept calling. Over about six months it became roughly six hires, among them more eCommerce, an Amazon account manager, partnerships, and sourcing and contract manufacturing, and it stopped only when a restructuring changed the company’s plans.
Speed wasn’t really what made it work, though. Knowing who could live in both worlds was. The audience came for the gaming culture, but the product still had to be sourced, made by a contract manufacturer, shipped and sold like any other drink, which meant the brand needed people who could talk to gamers and to a plant manager in the same afternoon. A packaged goods veteran who didn’t get the culture would have bored the customer, and a gaming marketer who had never haggled with a co-packer would have quietly sunk the margin.
That’s the candidate we hunt for on most consumer brand searches now. Not the biggest logo on the resume. The person who fits the brand you actually are, at the stage you’re actually at, which is why Samantha keeps telling clients that a resume shows where someone has been and not where they can go. She wrote up how that search began in her piece on job descriptions.
22.2%
more soft drink manufacturing locations in 2025 than in 2022
4.5%
growth in soft drink manufacturing jobs over the same three years
17.1%
of U.S. retail sales made online in the second quarter of 2026
92%
twelve-month retention across KORE1 placements
Sources: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2022 and 2025 annual averages, NAICS 312111. U.S. Census Bureau Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales, second quarter 2026, seasonally adjusted. KORE1 placement records.
Where CPG Recruiters Find eCommerce and Amazon People
Online sales made up 17.1% of U.S. retail in the second quarter of 2026, by the Census Bureau’s count, and they grew 12.2% over the year while retail as a whole grew 6.7%. For a consumer brand, that online shelf runs on its own rules.
An Amazon account manager lives in ad consoles, listings, reviews, inventory placement and retailer compliance. An eCommerce or DTC lead owns the brand’s own site, its subscriptions and its email list. They look alike on a job board. They aren’t, and a brand that hires one expecting the other finds out within a quarter.
So where do the good ones come from? The strongest marketplace people we meet have often run several brands’ accounts at a marketplace agency, or grown up inside a brand that started on Amazon. Strong eCommerce leads come out of DTC startups, and out of retail planning and merchandising, where they learned inventory and margin before they ever wrote a subject line.
Timing depends on the seat. A fresh req with responsive interviewers can close in two or three weeks, in Samantha’s experience, and a seat an internal hire already tried and left usually takes a month or two. When a launch can’t wait, contract-to-hire puts someone on the marketplace seat now, while brand leadership is typically a direct hire search.
Four Seats CPG Recruiters Fill Most
From the brand itself to the people who get it made, these are the groups we hire for. Early on, one hire often covers two of them. Say so in the posting and you’ll draw the right generalist.
Brand
Brand and marketing leadership
Brand managers, marketing directors and heads of marketing who own positioning, launches and the retail calendar.
eCommerce
eCommerce and direct-to-consumer
eCommerce directors and managers who run the brand’s own site, subscriptions, email and digital shelf.
Marketplace
Amazon and retail marketplace
Amazon account managers and marketplace leads who handle advertising, listings, inventory and retailer compliance.
Operations
Sourcing, partnerships and manufacturing
Sourcing and contract manufacturing leads, plus the partnerships people who land collaborations and retail deals.
A few of these roles get a page of their own. Positioning work is on brand strategist staffing, launch marketing on product marketing manager staffing and paid and lifecycle channels on digital marketing staffing. Our brand partnerships recruiters take collaborations and sponsorships, and the top marketing job belongs to CMO executive search.
If the brand sits next to a game studio, the way the one in Samantha’s story did, the studio’s own hiring belongs to our gaming recruiters. Brands running their store on an ERP get ERP staffing for DTC brands, and brands that have outgrown their store get a tech stack review before the next peak. Whichever desk fills the seat, the scorecard afterward is the same, and 92% of KORE1 placements are past the one-year mark and still going.
Common Questions
What does a CPG recruiter do?
CPG recruiters fill the marketing and commercial seats at consumer packaged goods brands. At KORE1 that covers brand managers, eCommerce and DTC leads, Amazon account managers, partnerships and sourcing roles, as direct hires or contract-to-hire.
Should we hire from big CPG companies or from startups?
Both, depending on your stage. Big-company people bring process, retailer relationships and trade marketing discipline, while startup people are used to owning everything on a small budget. We ask how someone handled the other side’s pace, because the jump in either direction is where hires go wrong.
Is it hard to find a good Amazon account manager?
Harder than the title suggests. The job mixes advertising, inventory, listings and retailer compliance, and few people are strong at all four. We screen on the accounts they actually ran, the ad budgets they managed and what happened to sales after they arrived.
Are more consumer brands competing for the same marketers?
More than three years ago, by one federal measure. Soft drink manufacturing locations rose 22.2% between 2022 and 2025 while jobs in the industry rose 4.5%, so more brands are drawing on a bench that barely grew.
Does a candidate need CPG experience to succeed at a consumer brand?
Not always. Sharp people from gaming, beauty, retail or agencies pick up brand and marketplace work quickly. Co-packer and supply experience is much harder to teach, so we hold that line tighter on sourcing and operations seats.
How long does a CPG marketing search take?
Two or three weeks, for a brand-new role whose interviewers respond fast. A seat that has sat open for months, or one an internal hire already tried and left, usually takes a month or two. Contract-to-hire helps when a launch date won’t move.
Which Seat Is Open Right Now?
Tell us the role, the stage your brand is at and when the person needs to start. We’ll tell you honestly who’s out there, what the seat costs and how soon it can be filled.
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