Jayen Mehta, the Marketer Who Modernised Amul From the Inside
The Amul Girl gave the brand a voice decades ago. The people running the company since have had to build the supply chain that lets that voice reach every shelf.
Jayen Mehta is the first Amul managing director to have spent his entire career on the marketing side of the business before taking the top job, and it shows in how deliberately he has tried to turn a brand that ran for decades on instinct and one legendary ad campaign into one that runs on structured marketing discipline as well.
Thirty-four years, one institution
Mehta joined GCMMF in 1991 and spent the next three decades moving through brand manager, group product manager and general manager roles inside the marketing function, a specifically commercial career path that is unusual for the eventual head of a farmer-owned cooperative federation. He briefly served as in-charge managing director of Amul Dairy in Anand in 2018, became chief operating officer of GCMMF in February 2022, and was made managing director in January 2023, succeeding R.S. Sodhi. His tenure was extended by five years in December 2024.
Modernising the machinery behind the brand
Much of what Mehta is specifically credited with is not visible in advertising at all. He is associated with moving Amul's supply chain toward a hub-and-spoke distribution model, the unglamorous logistics work that determines whether a trusted brand actually shows up reliably on a shelf, and with pushing the cooperative's expansion into international markets including the United States and Europe. A brand can only be as strong as its distribution allows it to be, and this is squarely distribution work.
The Amul Girl gave the brand a voice decades ago. The people running the company since have had to build the supply chain that lets that voice reach every shelf it promises to.
Recognition from the marketing industry itself
Unlike many FMCG chief executives who come from finance or operations, Mehta has been recognised repeatedly by name within the marketing industry itself, named among India's influential marketing leaders by Businessworld in 2021, awarded Marketer of the Year for FMCG Food by the International Advertising Association, and Best CMO by Pitch and Exchange4Media the same year. That level of industry-specific recognition for a cooperative-federation executive, rather than a conventional multinational CMO, is genuinely uncommon.
Building on top of an institution he did not create
Mehta's position is structurally different from a founder's. He inherited both Kurien's cooperative architecture and Sodhi's aggressive marketing legacy, and his job has been to professionalise and extend both without breaking either. Being elected the first chairman of the newly formed Sardar Patel Cooperative Dairy Federation, and seeing that federation's brand turnover cross the one lakh crore rupee mark in its first financial year under his watch, suggests the model is still scaling rather than plateauing.
The quieter kind of brand builder
Mehta's version of brand building is less visible than a famous tagline or a viral topical ad, and that is precisely the point. Distribution modernisation, cooperative federation governance and international expansion do not generate headlines the way a clever cartoon does. But none of Amul's advertising means anything if the product it promises is not reliably on the shelf when a customer looks for it, and that reliability is the specific thing Mehta has spent thirty-four years building toward.
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