Darigold Appoints New Interim Chief Executive Officer
One of the nation’s largest dairy companies, Darigold, Inc., announced that Chief Executive Officer, Joe Coote, is leaving the company, and the Board Chairman, Allan Huttema, has been named the interim CEO, effective immediately.
Coote, who has spent 12 years working globally in the dairy sector, joined Darigold three years ago as the president of its international ingredients division and was named the cooperative’s CEO in January 2022. The Australian native is stepping down from his role as he intends to return to his home country.
“Serving as CEO of Darigold the last two years was a great privilege,” Coote says. “I have enormous respect and admiration for our farmer-owners and the teams across our business that work so hard to keep our customers stocked with great, high-quality dairy products. Having been away from my home country for many years now, my family and I are ready to return to Australia to begin new adventures back home.”
Huttema shares that Joe took over as CEO at a time when the company was early into a transformation to grow and modernize the business.
“Under his leadership, we took significant steps forward on that effort, beginning construction of our new facility in Pasco, launching a migration of our business management systems, and beginning to develop a culture rooted in excellence in operations,” he says.
Huttema – one of Darigold’s 300 farmer-owners, has been a member of the cooperative business’ board of directors for the last nine years, of which he has held the position of chairman for the last three. He shares that he will take over as interim CEO with the benefit of having an extremely capable leadership team in place, including several Darigold veterans and newer leaders with proven track records across the dairy and consumer packaged goods sectors.
“Our business is structured to run around two divisions – business to business and business to consumer – each with experienced, proven leaders running them,” he says. “I have full confidence that the team and the structure we have in place will help ensure that we continue serving our customers in the way they have come to expect from us.”
Headquartered in Seattle, Darigold, Inc. is the marketing and processing subsidiary of the Northwest Dairy Association (NDA), which is owned by nearly 300 family-owned farms in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Darigold handles approximately 10 billion pounds of milk annually.
