John Brase and the business of earning your place

In September 2024, John Brase returned to the University of Missouri with a warning about the very thing business students were hoping to become. Leadership, he told them, had to be earned. A title would not settle the matter. By then, he had spent roughly three decades at Procter & Gamble and another four years at J.M. Smucker. He had considerable experience with titles. His advice suggested they were a poor place to stop counting.

Two years later, that proposition has acquired a fresh test. Brase became president and chief executive officer of Conagra Brands on June 1, 2026, succeeding Sean Connolly and joining the board. The familiar names now under his watch include Birds Eye, Duncan Hines, Marie Callender’s and Slim Jim. These are brands encountered in kitchens, freezer aisles and convenience stores, places where an executive’s business card carries rather less weight than the product.

There is a pleasing tension in Brase’s career. He knows the machinery of large companies: the portfolio, the factory, the sales organization, the margin. Yet some of his most revealing public remarks concern belonging, humility and the limits of position. The route to his new office runs through both sets of concerns. Following it means looking beyond the succession announcement.

A marketing education, followed by the whole machine

Brase graduated from Missouri in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. His academic background was in marketing; he also earned an MBA from Saint Louis University. His subsequent work at P&G moved across sales, marketing and brand management. Those functions bring different questions to the same product: why someone wants it, how a retailer sells it, and whether the business can make money supplying it.

By April 2016, he was leading P&G’s North American Family Care business, a roughly $6 billion operation. His career there included work across Charmin, Bounty, Puffs and Pampers. A roll of paper towels is an unglamorous object on which to build an executive biography. It is also a useful reminder that consumer goods depend on repeated purchases. Applause at a product launch cannot do the weekly shopping.

That background matters to the shape of his later jobs. When Smucker appointed him chief operating officer, effective April 13, 2020, the remit already extended well beyond advertising. He would oversee its three U.S. business segments, along with Away From Home, operations and supply chain. The company was hiring someone to connect businesses and functions that customers experience as a single purchase.

At the time of his appointment, Smucker described more than 40 brands present in 90 percent of U.S. homes. That 2020 snapshot puts the move in perspective. Its portfolio included Folgers, Jif and Milk-Bone, alongside Café Bustelo and Uncrustables. Brase was entering a company with a place in several household routines, from the morning coffee to feeding a pet. His responsibilities crossed those categories as well as the operations behind them, bringing the commercial and production sides of the business into the same brief.

The newcomer on the other side of the screen

Brase joined Smucker in a largely virtual working environment. After so long at one employer, he was learning a different organization without the usual full measure of office life. A year later, in an essay reflecting on the move, he described feeling connected to colleagues anyway. The surprise was how much the culture mattered, even though he had expected it to be strong.

He wrote about the balance between established brands producing profit and emerging brands offering growth. He also praised a leadership team whose members brought different perspectives and complemented one another. The combination is revealing: he considered both the composition of the portfolio and the composition of the room. In his telling, collaboration benefited from a shared understanding of where the company was going.

“I underestimated the unique value of our culture.”

John Brase, reflecting on his first year at Smucker, 2021

There is something useful about a senior operator admitting an underestimate. It leaves room for experience to change the calculation. Brase’s reflection reads as an appreciation of what he had encountered rather than a claim to have arrived with every answer. For someone who had spent decades accumulating expertise, the newcomer’s perspective offered a different kind of education.

When simplification became part of the job

In April 2025, Smucker added president to Brase’s title. His responsibilities included coffee, frozen handheld foods and spreads, pet foods, sweet baked snacks, international operations and Away From Home. Sales, operations and supply chain also remained in his remit. The list makes the scale of the coordinating task plain. Different products and customers had to share a functioning corporate system.

Smucker credited him with helping introduce its Transformation Office, which pursued cost savings and productivity improvements to support earnings and reinvestment. The company also highlighted his attention to growth brands and simplification. Such work rarely produces a photograph as memorable as a new product. Its consequences can be more widely felt: resources saved in one part of an organization can become resources available elsewhere.

The next turn came quickly. On February 9, 2026, Smucker eliminated the chief operating officer role and Brase left the company. Mark Smucker resumed the president title as responsibilities were redistributed among senior leaders. The sequence belongs in the story because a career is made of departures as well as promotions. The presidency had lasted less than a year; the next appointment would place Brase in charge of another company altogether.

A different kind of return on investment

There was another strand developing away from the organizational chart. Brase and his wife, Allison, supported the Brase RISE Scholars Program at Missouri through a gift. Introduced alongside a consumer packaged goods career pathway in September 2024, the scholars program was designed for students with financial need, including those who might be the first in their families to attend college.

The initials stand for raise, inspire, support and empower. The associated pathway gives students exposure to an industry spanning sales, marketing, procurement and supply chain. It is a practical extension of the business world Brase knows. His return to campus brought a senior executive’s experience into contact with students who were still deciding how to begin.

At the Making Me Marketable conference, he encouraged students to try unfamiliar things and accept mistakes as part of learning. He also urged them to manage their commitments. That second piece of advice deserves its place beside the first. An invitation to seize opportunities becomes more useful when it acknowledges that calendars have edges. Enthusiasm is easier to recommend than to schedule.

His interests in leadership also appeared in a 2024 conversation on the podcast Win At Home First. The discussion addressed faith, humility and the relationship between success and significance. His biography for the episode described a “Success to Significance” leaders’ group he had established to help business leaders increase their community impact. The language connects with the campus work: achievement creates an opportunity to help other people proceed.

A new office, and some untidy arithmetic

Conagra announced Brase’s appointment on April 13, 2026. The move followed Connolly’s decade-plus tenure. Brase’s stated ambitions covered revenue growth, stronger margins and cash generation, alongside value for consumers and shareholders. They were broad ambitions, as an incoming chief executive’s usually are. The more useful question was how they would translate into choices once he was in the chair.

The board’s 2026 message to shareholders supplied a sober backdrop: the company’s fiscal-year performance had fallen below expectations. Brase arrived with experience relevant to the task, but experience does not settle an income statement in advance. A transition can change the decision-maker immediately. Changing the business takes longer, and the customers are under no obligation to observe the timetable.

By September 30, he was describing priorities that included restoring margins, increasing investment, reducing complexity and rebalancing capital allocation. Conagra’s first quarter of fiscal 2027, which ended August 30, offered a mixed early picture. Reported net sales fell 1.4 percent year over year, while adjusted earnings per share rose 5.1 percent. Those measures describe different parts of the business and reward careful reading.

The company reaffirmed its full-year guidance. That leaves the story in progress. The early figures provide something firmer than a welcome announcement, while offering limited grounds for a verdict on a tenure that began only in June.

Room for a 429-foot snack

September brought an occasion with a less conventional unit of measurement. In Omaha, Slim Jim secured a Guinness World Records title for a meat snack stick measuring 429 feet, 5 inches. The project began in June 2025 with an 11-person Conagra team. It therefore predated Brase’s arrival by almost a year, a detail worth preserving when the new chief executive joins the celebration.

Brase said he attended and publicly credited the employees who made it happen. The company’s account put the finished stick at nearly 70 pounds. At that scale, a snack becomes a logistical proposition. It also gives colleagues something to celebrate together that requires no explanation of adjusted earnings.

The scene sits comfortably beside his earlier reflections on teams. At Missouri, Brase told students that a position did not entitle someone to leadership. At Smucker, he wrote about being surprised by the strength of a culture. Now, at Conagra, the work includes financial decisions, brand decisions and the ordinary business of recognizing the people doing the work. His name is on the chief executive’s door. Earning his place remains a daily assignment.