MFT has won regionally for decades through local customer intimacy and local execution. That strength is real, and it stays. But the next chapter of our growth depends on a different muscle. A small set of global product platforms, designed once, reused everywhere, protected and improved at the enterprise level.
We have built equipment one region at a time for a hundred years. We are now going to find out if we can build it for the world.
The forces pushing us here are real. MFT grew through decades of regional success and selective acquisitions. That history built strong local businesses, and it also left us running parallel platform efforts that are getting more expensive every year. The technology underneath our products has shifted from mostly mechanical to increasingly software, controls, and connectivity, and that shift punishes fragmentation in a way mechanical-only equipment did not.
We are creating the Vice President, Global Product Platforms & Innovation role to build that muscle from the ground up. You will own MFT’s most important platforms end to end. Strategy, roadmap, architecture, technical execution, lifecycle, and economics. The single exception is manufacturing, which is owned by regional plants. You will stand up a dedicated platform organization that has not existed at MFT before. You will define the lanes between platform and region, and you will hold both sides to them.
We are not looking for a heroic founder. We are looking for someone who builds a function that endures past them.
If you do this well, three things will be true in five years. MFT’s priority platforms will be the technical and economic engine of the business. Regional teams will win local customers faster because the platform core gives them more to work with. And MFT will have a repeatable way to invent the next platform after these.
At launch, you will own three global platforms:
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Valve technology and solutions serving the fountain category. The core dispense technology behind some of the world’s most recognized beverage brands.
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Contact toasting technology and product platforms for global multinationals. The platform that serves the largest, most demanding QSR customers on the planet.
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Holding bin technology platforms. The core hot-holding technology behind consistent food quality at the moment of service.
This is a build role, not a run role. Platform technical work today sits inside regional engineering and product teams. Part of your first eighteen months is transitioning that work into the new dedicated structure, thoughtfully, with the regional Presidents as partners. You will write the operating model, hire and assemble your teams, appoint your Platform Leaders, set the cadences and decision rights, and define the service contract that connects platforms to regions. None of this exists yet. That is the role.