Zoetis Folds Its COO Job Into the CFO's, One Day After Cutting Guidance

One day after telling investors the back half of the year needs to work harder than the front half did, animal health's largest public company handed its finance chief's job to someone else — and added operations on top of it. Zoetis said outgoing CFO Wetteny Joseph will step back by August 17, and that incoming executive Jay Saccaro will take over finance and operations, including global manufacturing and supply, in a single newly created seat.

Zoetis creates a combined CFO and COO role

Zoetis named Jay Saccaro Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, effective August 17, 2026. The company disclosed the appointment on August 5, the same week it reported flat second-quarter revenue and a second guidance cut in two quarters.

Saccaro spent the past three years as CFO of GE HealthCare and, before that, eight years as EVP and CFO of Baxter International, following earlier finance and treasury roles at Baxter and Hill-Rom. CEO Kristin Peck called him a "seasoned finance executive with 12 years of CFO experience" whose background pairs finance discipline with operational scope.

Joseph, who has led Zoetis's finance function for five years, will not leave immediately. He shifts to a special advisor role reporting to Peck through early 2027, a transition window the company says is meant to hand off institutional knowledge on financial matters rather than exit on the day of the announcement.

The new title is the tell. Zoetis didn't hire a COO alongside its CFO. It merged the two, putting one executive in charge of both the numbers and the factories that produce them.

Why finance and supply chain now share a boss

Combining CFO and COO into one seat is still uncommon among large-cap public companies, and doing it the same week you cut guidance is a specific signal, not a coincidence. Zoetis's own second-quarter release pointed to softening US companion-animal spending and intensifying price competition in parasiticides as the drivers behind the cut. Neither problem is something a finance chief solves by tightening budgets alone.

Putting manufacturing and supply under the same executive who owns the P&L is a bet that Zoetis's next source of margin isn't in pricing power, which the company has already said is eroding, but in how efficiently it makes and moves product. That's a different lever than the one Zoetis has leaned on historically, and it puts operational execution on the same performance scorecard as the earnings the market is watching every quarter.

It also fits a pattern the sector is showing in real time. Zoetis's own second-quarter results landed flat against a year ago, while Elanco raised its full-year guidance for the second straight quarter over the same three months, and IDEXX beat estimates and raised guidance again on diagnostics strength. Zoetis isn't alone in facing cost and share pressure in animal health, but it is the first of that group to answer with a structural change to who runs the company day to day rather than a change to guidance language.

Saccaro's own framing leaned into that scope rather than downplaying it. "There is tremendous runway to build on that legacy, and I'm eager to help unlock the opportunities ahead," he said of the role, a sentence that reads as much about supply chain as about the balance sheet.

This is also the third executive-suite change The Underbite has tracked at a major pet-industry company since August 3, alongside I and love and you naming Dan Waters CEO and Odie Pet Insurance hiring a new chief growth officer — a faster clip of leadership turnover across the category than any single week earlier this summer produced.

The transition Zoetis has to manage through early 2027

The near-term test is the handoff itself. Joseph stays on through early 2027 specifically to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door with him, which suggests Zoetis expects the combined role to take real time to stand up, not just a title change on an org chart.

Watch third-quarter results, typically reported in early November, for the first read on whether Saccaro's mandate shows up in the numbers. A combined CFO-COO role is supposed to tighten the link between operational decisions and financial ones; if Zoetis's cost structure or supply chain performance moves before its top-line growth does, that's the new structure working as designed. If neither moves, the merger will look more like a cost-cutting signal dressed up as an operating one.

Also worth tracking: whether other animal-health or pet-industry public companies follow with similar combined-role appointments of their own. A single company merging two C-suite jobs during a soft quarter is a data point. A second one doing the same thing within the next two quarters would make it a trend worth naming.

Source: Zoetis via Business Wire