Louisa has run both halves of a grocery business — the buying and the operating — in hard discount, the format with the least tolerance for slack in either. She brings 20+ years in UK and US grocery and food retail, including senior leadership at Lidl across both markets as Senior Director of Purchasing, Vice President of Purchasing, and SVP of Operations / COO. Most recently she was COO of a mission-driven food business connecting regional farmers with consumers and institutions through values-driven supply chains.

Her pattern is building functions that did not previously exist. Across those roles she led multi-hundred-person teams spanning buying administration, quality assurance, packaging and design, merchandise planning and strategic sourcing — repeatedly establishing new departments from scratch, hiring and developing the teams to run them, and implementing process change that delivered both near-term efficiency and durable strategic benefit.

That combination — retail operations, strategic purchasing, quality assurance and regulatory compliance under a single leader — gives her a grounded view of what it takes to stand up and scale a high-performing function in a fast-moving, low-margin retail environment.

At The Convened, Louisa works with retail and food businesses on operations and purchasing capability: assessing how a function is really performing, building or rebuilding it, and developing the leaders inside it.

Excels at: retail operations leadership, strategic purchasing and sourcing, merchandise planning, quality assurance and regulatory compliance, standing up new functions and teams.