Rohan Kulkarni has been promoted to Senior Director, On-Premise (Away-from-Home Business) at The Coca-Cola Company in India. With extensive experience across marketing, modern trade, digital commerce and integrated execution, he previously led strategy for a ₹12,000 crore regional business. His new role strengthens Coca-Cola’s focus on India’s expanding out-of-home consumption ecosystem.
In the fast-moving world of consumer beverages, where brand loyalty is hard-won and competition only intensifies with every passing year, leadership transitions often signal deeper strategic shifts. For The Coca-Cola Company in India, the elevation of Rohan Kulkarni to Senior Director, On-Premise (Away-from-Home Business), marks one such pivotal moment. With a career forged across the country’s most dynamic consumer categories and sharpened through roles that demanded equal parts precision and creativity, Rohan’s rise reflects both his individual track record and the evolving ambitions of one of the world’s most recognised brands in one of its most important growth markets.
The away-from-home business—spanning restaurants, cafes, travel hubs, institutions, entertainment venues and countless micro touchpoints—has become increasingly central to Coca-Cola India’s strategy. It is a channel where brand experience often defines brand recall, and where the journey from consumer intention to consumption is measured in seconds. As post-pandemic consumer behaviour stabilises and out-of-home consumption rebounds across urban and semi-urban pockets, this business is rapidly regaining scale. To lead it at such a moment requires both operational grounding and a strong instinct for cultural shifts, qualities that have come to define Rohan’s career.
Before this promotion, Rohan served as the marketing lead for Coca-Cola India’s North and West regions—oversized markets that collectively represent some of the most complex, high-consumption territories in the country. The business value he managed crossed INR 12,000 crore, but its significance went beyond scale. Operating in these regions meant navigating socio-cultural diversity, seasonal fluctuations, market competition, and deeply localised consumption habits. Under his leadership, strategy and execution converged in a way that strengthened Coca-Cola’s portfolio architecture, ensuring that each brand—from sparkling to hydration to value-added dairy—held a clear, compelling role in the consumer’s mind.
Rohan’s marketing tenure focused on accelerating consumer engagement through sharper insights, stronger storytelling, and more responsive market interventions. His approach leaned heavily on data-led understanding of how Indian households consume beverages across different occasions, climates, and cultural rhythms. This insight-driven strategy enabled targeted campaigns that not only lifted brand preference but also ensured that Coca-Cola’s offerings remained relevant in highly penetrated, aggressively contested categories.
But Rohan’s impact within the company has stretched well beyond regional marketing leadership. Over the years, he has been entrusted with roles that sit at the core of Coca-Cola India’s long-term capability building. One of these was leading Integrated Execution, a space that demands the rare ability to align on-ground activations, distribution mechanisms, and customer experience with brand objectives. His work streamlined execution across retail ecosystems, ensuring that the brand’s visibility, placement, promotions and consumer touchpoints operated in concert. In a country as vast and varied as India, integrated execution is not just a function—it is a competitive advantage.
Additionally, Rohan played a pivotal role in modern trade and digital commerce, shaping strategies in two of the fastest-growing retail formats in the country. India’s modern trade landscape has evolved rapidly, driven by organised retail, e-commerce penetration, and shifting consumer preferences toward curated shopping experiences. In this environment, he oversaw partnerships with India’s biggest retail chains, collaboratively crafting brand plans, co-marketing strategies and in-store experiences that boosted both category growth and customer satisfaction.
On the digital commerce front, Rohan helped Coca-Cola navigate radical shifts in consumer behaviour as online grocery, quick-commerce, and digital-first retail platforms surged. His contributions included launching digitally optimised product formats, strengthening supply chain integration for online fulfilment, and building frameworks that unified digital insights with traditional retail execution. These innovations improved speed-to-market and elevated the brand’s relevance in a landscape where convenience is increasingly synonymous with consumption.
Earlier in his Coca-Cola journey, Rohan worked on long-term commercial strategies for modern trade across India and South West Asia. These markets, though distinct in their maturity and retail sophistication, share common patterns of evolving consumer aspirations and ecosystem transformation. The strategies he helped develop strengthened value creation across emerging retail formats and positioned Coca-Cola to adapt quickly to new commercial opportunities. By focusing on scalable models and flexible operational structures, he contributed to a framework that continues to support Coca-Cola’s growth in high-potential markets.
Rohan’s foundation in leadership and business strategy, however, was set much before he joined the beverage giant. His early years at Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s most influential consumer goods companies, provided him with a rigorous grounding in go-to-market operations, modern retail management, national account oversight, and distribution expansion. At P&G, excellence is engineered into everyday routines—from forecasting to negotiation to market activation—and Rohan carried forward this discipline into every subsequent chapter of his career. Managing GTM strategies and territory expansion allowed him to develop a deep understanding of how consumer goods move, how retail ecosystems shape demand, and how profitability is built at both distributor and customer levels.
This early experience proved invaluable, particularly in India’s beverage sector, where consumption behaviour fluctuates with climate, culture, and even micro-geographical changes. The combination of P&G’s structural discipline and Coca-Cola’s fast-paced, consumer-facing dynamism allowed Rohan to grow into a leader capable of bridging strategy with execution and long-term planning with real-time responsiveness.
The elevation to Senior Director, On-Premise, therefore, comes at an intersection where his accumulated expertise meets Coca-Cola India’s renewed focus on strengthening its away-from-home business. This channel, historically significant for driving both brand strength and trial, is experiencing new energy as India’s urbanisation accelerates, dining-out culture deepens and digital payments transform small and mid-scale restaurants. The rise of QSRs, cloud kitchens, boutique cafés, and premium experiential dining has expanded the canvas on which beverage brands operate. At the same time, entertainment venues, travel corridors, colleges, offices and institutional spaces have become more important as consumer mobility increases.
Rohan’s new mandate will involve crafting strategies that align with both macro and micro shifts in consumption. From building stronger customer partnerships and optimising equipment placement to creating channel-specific marketing and enhancing operational excellence, the role demands a blend of analytical capability, relationship management, cultural understanding and executional rigour. The challenge is not merely to grow volume but to shape beverage occasions in ways that feel natural to consumers and valuable to customers.
With India poised to remain one of Coca-Cola’s most critical markets globally, leadership decisions such as this are both symbolic and strategic. Rohan Kulkarni’s elevation signals confidence in his ability to lead transformative work, drive customer-centric growth, and build execution engines that can adapt to the changing contours of India’s beverage ecosystem. His journey, marked by cross-functional fluency and an instinct for unlocking value in complex markets, mirrors the direction in which Coca-Cola aims to move—towards a future anchored in deeper customer connections, sharper market insights and stronger on-ground execution.
As Coca-Cola India gears up for its next phase of growth, especially in the vibrant and expanding away-from-home landscape, Rohan’s role becomes central to shaping how the brand appears, behaves and performs in the everyday lives of millions. His promotion is more than an internal milestone—it is a reflection of the brand’s intent to combine strategic leadership with executional excellence at a time when consumer habits are evolving faster than ever.
