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Roberto Uchoa

Senior PartnerChicago

Roberto leads cross-practice efforts between our Agriculture and Sustainability practices, as well as our consumer operations work in North America.

Roberto leads McKinsey’s Agriculture Practice globally and our consumer operations work in North America.

As an advisor to agricultural and food and nutrition companies, Roberto brings on-the-ground experience in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Europe. He partners with executives to address their most pressing strategic and performance issues, including growth, merger management, commercial excellence, supply-chain optimization, and organizational restructuring.

Since joining McKinsey, Roberto has built extensive expertise designing growth strategies and delivering performance improvements across commercial and supply-chain operations. Working with companies across the globe, he has led efforts to assess value-chain vulnerabilities and growth opportunities in the dairy, protein, row-crops, oilseeds, and starch and sweeteners sectors. Roberto also supports complex postmerger situations, defining integration approaches and ramping up value-capture teams.

Examples of his recent client work include the following:

  • leading a rapid performance-improvement initiative for a grain and food-ingredient company, identifying substantial profit improvement potential across manufacturing, sourcing, logistics, and commercial areas
  • driving merger integrations for global companies in animal nutrition, chemicals, agricultural inputs, food ingredients, and logistics
  • setting enterprise strategy for more than 20 business units of a global food company, including performance aspirations and new growth areas
  • defining a milk and dairy ingredient strategy for a global food company, including setting contract-manufacturing approach, identifying potential joint ventures, and building in-house capabilities
  • developing a growth strategy for a global protein company, including performance-improvement initiatives and the M&A agenda
  • building a growth strategy for global food company, identifying markets for international expansion, setting entry strategies, identifying merger opportunities, and planning a new organizational structure
  • deploying a global performance-improvement program addressing pricing, sales-force effectiveness, supply chain, manufacturing, and network footprint for a global animal-nutrition company
  • designing and delivering a multiyear pricing, go-to-market, and supply-chain transformation for a global agricultural inputs company, leading to improvements in market share, margins, and customer satisfaction

Roberto has contributed to several of the World Economic Forum’s major reports on sustainable agriculture. He is fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Published work

Novel proteins: Consumer appetite for sustainably made ingredients,” McKinsey & Company, March 2024

Seizing opportunities amid the agtech capital drought,” McKinsey & Company, March 2024

Top priorities for dairy executives in 2023,” McKinsey & Company, March 2023

How the COVID-19 pandemic has changed dairy preferences among US consumers,” McKinsey & Company, May 2021

What US dairy executives learned from the pandemic,” McKinsey & Company, May 2021

What's ahead for the dairy industry,” McKinsey & Company, May 2021

What’s next for the North American dairy industry?,” McKinsey & Company, August 2020

Disruption in the dairy aisle,” McKinsey & Company, March 2020

Achieving optimal yields and efficiency in European meat processing,” McKinsey & Company, January 2020

Five insights into the views and behaviors of the US dairy consumer,” McKinsey & Company, September 2019

The evolving perspectives and strategies of dairy executives,” McKinsey & Company, July 2019

A winning growth formula for dairy,” McKinsey & Company, March 2019

Recipe for success for sourcing in the food industry,” McKinsey & Company, April 2017

Education

Northwestern University
MBA

Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
BS, electrical engineering