Speaker

Currently working as Chief Procurement Officer at IFFCO, Melahat is a Core procurement professional and having spent 25 years of her business life with Unilever & IFFCO, she is used to working with local, regional, and global teams and handling various portfolio in global and cluster roles. In her current role and for the last 2-5 years she has looked after several markets that started with MENA, she then assumed responsibility for Russia & Belarus, and which eventually included EMEA on the last year. Being born and growing up in a VUCA environment, Melahat brings that 2.5-decade experience into her management style. She is happy, since the super VUCA environment enabled her to develop specific muscles such as cost management, agility, growth mindset and being problem-solution minded partner. In addition, Melahat is enthusiastic in developing and growing the people in her eco system. She is doing coaching both inside Unilever, IFFCO and in other external platforms as well such as startups in university campuses, which is in line with her life purpose of creating a positive impact in people’s lives. She's even developing a business model to teach our future talents. One muscle Melahat also gained and have been enjoying is to fix distorted organizations by building efficient teams with a good balance of utilizing their capabilities & capacities. She was also the one who initiated women empowerment program in Turkey with the UN by extending the business ecosystems to create bigger impact to influence the industry: to increase the women population in the business as senior decision makers. Melahat holds extensive experience in responsible sourcing via sustainable sources as well as create social impact in the industries via her business partners in EMEA.