Tony Crouch

Tony Crouch - Head of Unilever R&D, ColworthUnilever UK
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Tony Crouch, Director of Laboratory, Unilever R&D, Colworth

After a brief academic career, and with tenure still a long way off, Tony left the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, and returned to the UK.He switched his interest from the Russian peasant commune to fast moving consumer goods and joined Unilever.

After an initial four-year period in Port Sunlight and London, Tony moved to Hong Kong as Finance Director of Unilever's consumer business and its nascent China Trade Desk.This period 1983/84, coincided with the economic turmoil that followed Mrs Thatcher's confrontation with the Chinese leadership over Hong Kong.

Tony then moved to New York to set up regional audit and treasury departments for Unilever's US businesses.This included collaboration with some major Wall Street firms at a time of the great leap forward of the financial services industry in 1985.

He then returned to the UK and to Port Sunlight as Finance Director of Unilever's chemicals business Unichema.The company with many others was emerging from the gloom of the industrial depression of the early and mid eighties.

In 1989 Tony moved with his family to Kinshasa, Zaire, to be Finance Director of Unilever's consumer goods property and plantations businesses.This was character-forming stuff and finished with a popular insurrection that was finally to bring the old regime down.

Not having learned to stay somewhere safe, Tony moved his family next to Karachi to join Lever Brother Pakistan in 1992.They had 4 happy years exploring Pakistan and India, during which a Walls Ice Cream business was built, and a wonder consumer goods company was protected from a crumbling civic infrastructure.

Having finally learned to stay out of trouble, Tony moved the family to Cambridge where he became Finance Director of Unilever's Plantations and Plant Science Group in 1996.He kept the family in Cambridge when he moved to Unilever's Strategic Centre in London in 2000 to run the corporate risk management exercise.

In November 2003, he took up his current role of Managing Director of Unilever Colworth, near Bedford.