Guilherme Mendes is the Chief Executive Officer of Great Southern Beverages, bringing more than 24 years of global leadership experience across the beverage, consumer goods, manufacturing, and technology sectors. Throughout his career, Guilherme has built and led high-performance teams across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, developing a reputation for operational discipline, commercial execution, turnaround leadership, and people-first management.

Guilherme began his career after earning a degree in Civil Engineering and later built a global business foundation through leadership roles at HSBC, AB InBev, Philip Morris International, Heineken, PPG Industries, and Axur. His beverage industry experience started at AB InBev/Ambev, where he managed key accounts, distributors, and category execution across major markets, leading teams of more than 200 people and overseeing significant annual volume. He later joined Heineken, where he led Sales and Trade Marketing in Brazil and served as Regional Sales Director for Asia, overseeing commercial execution and capability development across 24 markets.

Over the years, Guilherme has led businesses through growth, transformation, and turnaround situations. At PPG, he managed large global and regional P&Ls, including leadership of business units in coatings, silicas, and architectural paints. His work included turning underperforming businesses into profitable operations, strengthening teams, improving pricing discipline, building commercial pipelines, and creating sustainable growth platforms. His experience also includes international expansion, enterprise partnerships, value-based pricing, route-to-market strategy, forecasting, S&OP, stakeholder management, and operational transformation.

As CEO of Great Southern Beverages, Guilherme’s mission is to help scale the company into one of the most reliable, customer-focused, and execution-driven beverage manufacturing platforms in the United States. He brings a global operator’s mindset to GSB, combining beverage industry expertise with disciplined manufacturing, strong customer partnerships, quality systems, and a passion for building teams that execute with urgency, accountability, and pride.

Fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with working knowledge of French, Guilherme has lived and worked around the world and has visited more than 75 countries. He holds an MBA from FGV, completed the HIMAC International Management Course at INSEAD, and completed Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. His leadership philosophy is simple: recruit great people, build trust, create clear goals, and execute with discipline, attitude, and passion.