A Conversation with Nutrien’s New Global Sales Lead Chris Reynolds

In early February, Nutrien Ltd. announced the appointment of Chris Reynolds as Executive Vice President, Global Sales. According to the company, this is a new role created “to unify leadership across the wholesale and retail sales organizations and strengthen how the business delivers value to customers worldwide.” The appointment follows a planned leadership transition as Jeff Tarsi, who has led Nutrien’s global retail business through a period of significant growth and transformation, steps into an advisory role.

“Chris’ experience, vision, and leadership will guide our global sales organization through its next phase of growth,” said Ken Seitz, President and CEO of Nutrien, in a press release announcing the move. “His track record of delivering results across our international operations makes him the right leader to deliver greater value for our customers worldwide, strengthen our teams, capture efficiency and enhance our execution.”

In his new role, Reynolds will align sales enablement across Nutrien’s wholesale and retail businesses, leveraging shared capabilities, network infrastructure, and commercial planning while keeping our respective sales teams focused on their unique customers. Just prior to the formal appointment, CropLife® Magazine had the chance to interview Reynolds about his goals for Nutrien.

According to Reynolds, he has over 25 years of experience in the global fertilizer industry. This includes more than 22 years at Nutrien, which he first joined back in 2003 as Sales Manager.

“Before then, I was working for a company in Sydney called Agrow Australia,” says Reynolds. “They marketed fertilizer products in Australia on behalf of various international agricultural suppliers. But when [Nutrien] approached me about joining them in 2003, being the giant company that they were, the opportunity was too great a chance for me to pass up.”

Since that time, Reynolds has held a variety of positions with Nutrien. This included covering Domestic & International Fertilizer and Industrial Product Sales, Supply Chain Excellence, and leadership of the company’s potash business. Most recently, he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer for Nutrien.

A Big Innovator

Nutrien was formed back in 2018 by the merger of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. and Agrium Inc. From its headquarters in Saskatoon, SK, CAN, the company oversees a vast network of more than 26,000 employees across the globe with operations in mining, crop nutrient/seed supply, and ag retail with annual sales of $29 billion. Overall, Nutrien is the world’s No. 1 producer of potash, the No. 3 producer of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and the No. 1 ag retailer with approximately 1,900 locations in more than seven countries.

When looking across the breath of this diversified company, Reynolds still thinks it can be described in one succinct word.

“Innovation,” he says. “It is all about us getting better as an entire company utilizing a continuous improvement mindset. We are always asking ‘how can we improve upon what we did yesterday?’”

In part, Reynolds credits Nutrien’s customer base for keeping the company motivated to strive for this innovation.

“Grower-customers are changing,” he says. “Their operations are getting bigger and more sophisticated and the amount of decision-making they have to do continues to get more complex. At Nutrien, we want to know how we can help with that.”

Luckily, Nutrien is already well positioned to achieve these goals with growers-customers, says Reynolds, based upon many of the company’s current market strengths. Perhaps most important of these is the relationships Nutrien has established with its clients around the globe.

“We’ve built these relationships up over decades through our grower-customers and ag retailers,” he says. “If you think back to the merger of Agrium and PotashCorp that created Nutrien, the value driver was to bring together the largest fertilizer producer in the world with the largest ag solutions provider in the world. The organizational change we are making now will really allow many of these efficiencies to be realized for our 4,000 sales agronomists around the world that are trusted to make recommendations to our customers.”

One of the other key market strengths Nutrien has at its disposal is its ability to deliver crop nutrition products to customers quickly.

“It’s a remarkable system we have invested in over the past decade or so,” says Reynolds. “Nutrien can take potash from the ground in Saskatchewan and have it in a crop field in Iowa within two weeks’ time!”

In part, he credits the global pandemic during 2020-21 with helping Nutrien better innovate and improve upon this fertilizer distribution model.

“In 2020, global disruptions reshaped how distribution worked across industries,” says Reynolds. “At Nutrien, this revealed opportunities to strengthen our supply chain network and sharpen our focus on investment. It reinforced the need to build greater resilience and redundancy to better manage events beyond our control.”

As an example of the lessons learned from global supply chain disruptions, Nutrien invested in adding two new distribution facilities to its network where the company can ship potash from. One of these is in Hammond, IN. The other is in Randolph, MN. According to Reynolds, these two facilities offers Nutrien alternatives to distribute its products across the Midwest if problems should hamper other parts of its distribution network.

“It’s all in the spirit of serving our customers,” he says.

Using Technology

Moving forward, Reynolds believes Nutrien will continue to invest in new ways to improve its entire operations. One of these will be through increasing use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

“Putting AI tools in the hands of skilled agronomists is one of the ways we see things going forward,” he says. “We have more than 4,000 crop consultants out there and making sure they have the latest technologies available to them to make the best recommendations to our customers is something we are definitely thinking about for 2026 and beyond.”

But besides helping customers, Reynolds believes new technologies such as AI could help Nutrien with its internal operations as well. For example, he says, consider safety.

“Ensuring the safety of our workers is a journey that never ends,” says Reynolds. “Many of our people work with large equipment in demanding environments. By using AI, we can quickly extract insights from years of safety data that would traditionally take months of manual review to analyze. AI allows us to identify patterns, assess risk, and act on safety recommendations in a fraction of the time – helping us put strategies in place sooner to reduce potential safety impacts for our employees.”

In addition to employing more technology across Nutrien, Reynolds says the company will continue to look at how to streamline its ag retail operations across North America.

“We have a capital improvement initiative focused on evaluating our retail network and identifying opportunities to consolidate older facilities into newer, safer, and more efficient locations,” he says.

He adds that Nutrien is also continuing to improve its digital portal, The HUB, which allows customers to more easily access and engage with Nutrients network of service offerings.

In the end, Reynolds thinks all these changes and innovations will make Nutrien the supplier of choice across our wholesale and retail channels.

“Our customers have a lot of choices who they do business with,” he says. “We want to be that trusted advisor of choice.”