The world’s biggest drinks companies are getting smaller, and the people who built them are finding out what that means in real time.
Diageo’s global workforce fell by nearly 2,000 people in the year to June 2026, and Reuters has reported that some of its teams are shrinking by 20% to 30% as CEO Dave Lewis pushes through a cost overhaul. Heineken has said it will cut 5,000 to 6,000 roles over two years, almost 7% of its global staff, chasing €400 million to €500 million in annual savings. Molson Coors has already eliminated about 400 salaried positions across its Americas business, roughly 9% of that unit’s salaried workforce.
None of the three companies is calling this a retreat. Diageo, Heineken and Molson Coors all describe the cuts as the opposite: a way to get leaner, move faster, and free up money for growth categories like non-alcoholic drinks, energy and mixers.
That framing matters, because behind every line about “productivity” or “duplication” is someone whose career just became a cost-saving statistic.
Mark Fisher knows the feeling. After more than 15 years at Diageo, working across major brands in what he calls a high-performing culture, Fisher was made redundant. He didn’t feel relief. He felt disappointed, unprepared and sad.
He went home to Norfolk with his Brazilian wife and their two daughters. What followed wasn’t another corporate job. He spent seven years near his elderly parents, worked with local businesses, and eventually moved his family to Florianópolis, Brazil. Looking back, he sees opportunities in that disruption that no career plan could have produced.
Where the people actually go
The current wave of cuts isn’t happening because people have stopped drinking. It’s happening because the biggest companies are fighting a more complicated market than they used to.
Heineken’s beer volumes weakened in Europe and the United States through 2025, and the company has pointed to soft consumer sentiment as one driver of its cuts. Molson Coors cited weak beer demand and rising aluminium costs, while also trying to speed up its push into non-alcoholic drinks and energy. For Diageo, the pressure is broader: Dave Lewis is running a $1 billion savings programme while trying to fix performance in some of the company’s biggest markets. Diageo’s disclosures show that decline wasn’t driven by redundancies alone; business disposals, including the sale of its EABL stake to Asahi, and a site closure also played a part.
Large beverage companies are asking the same question right now: are their structures too expensive, too complicated, or too slow for the markets they’re competing in today? That usually means consolidating functions, centralising operations and using technology to do work that used to need bigger teams. The companies still want to grow. They just think they can do it with fewer people.
For someone outside the balance sheet, “headcount reduction” sounds abstract. For someone who’s spent 15 years inside a company, it can feel like the sudden loss of a professional identity. That’s part of why Fisher’s story is worth taking seriously. He doesn’t describe his time at Diageo as a mistake. What unsettled him was the abrupt jump from being part of a system that shaped his working life to figuring out, overnight, what came next.
Other former Diageo employees have taken very different paths.
Brian Makela spent 15 years at Diageo before leaving in 2019. He went on to found Formulated Ethanol Solutions, a beverage development business, and later built Bad Ideas, which works on alcohol and non-alcoholic product development. His corporate years became the foundation for something entirely his own.
Lisa Harrison left Diageo after almost 18 years. She’s said she took time to reconnect with the people and values that mattered to her before moving into a role with Save the Children UK. Her path wasn’t instant reinvention. It was a pause, then a change of direction.
Then there’s Tim Etherington-Judge, a former Diageo global brand ambassador who left the company after a serious mental health breakdown in 2016 brought on by years of intense travel and work in drinks and hospitality. He went on to found Healthy Hospo, a not-for-profit focused on the wellbeing of hospitality workers, and later co-founded Avallen Spirits. His isn’t a redundancy story, and that’s exactly why it belongs here: leaving a major drinks company doesn’t always lead back to another corporate ladder. Sometimes it leads to a business. Sometimes to a completely different cause.
What the industry actually loses
Companies have legitimate reasons to restructure. A business can’t keep every role just because someone has held it for years, and cost control now can prevent something worse later.
But there’s a cost that doesn’t show up on a restructuring spreadsheet. Someone leaving after 15 or 20 years takes with them a working knowledge of how a market actually behaves: which distributors matter, why a past launch failed, which relationships hold a business together on the ground. That knowledge doesn’t vanish with the person. It moves, sometimes to another beverage company, sometimes to a start-up, a consultancy, or a completely different industry. Makela’s path shows one version of that movement. Fisher’s shows another.
A harder path for the next generation
There’s also a generational question sitting underneath all this. For decades, joining a major multinational was one of the clearest paths into a beverage career: move through functions and markets, build a network, spend a career inside one system. The cuts at Diageo, Heineken and Molson Coors suggest that even established careers inside the biggest names in drinks aren’t protected from restructuring anymore.
That doesn’t mean multinational careers are disappearing. It means the people inside them may need to think differently about what they’re building while they’re there. A job title can vanish overnight. An org chart can be redrawn in a quarter. But commercial judgement, real relationships and an actual read on consumers travel with a person wherever they go next.
Fisher’s story ended somewhere no restructuring announcement could have predicted: years back home with his parents before they died, work with small businesses in Norfolk, and eventually a new life on a beach in Brazil. None of that was in the plan when he joined Diageo.
That doesn’t make redundancy painless. For some people the next stretch means months of uncertainty, or financial pressure, or simply another corporate role somewhere else. But the people who’ve already left the big beverage companies point to something bigger than this particular round of cuts: the industry’s talent isn’t disappearing. It’s moving. The real question is where it lands next, and whether the companies doing the cutting understand what’s actually walking out the door with each departure.
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