The hiring is part of a leadership restructuring at The Simply Good Foods Co. under new president and CEO Geoff Tanner, who has made product innovation and brand refreshment of Atkins goals for the company. Ryan Thomas, most recently the chief commercial officer for Lakeville, Minnesota-based Post, will start Oct.

9 as the senior vice president and general manager of Atkins marketing for Simply Good Foods. Thomas became chief commercial officer at Post in the spring after it acquired pet foods businesses from the JM Smucker Co. Thomas, whose LinkedIn profile lists Boulder as his home city, had been overseeing the marketing of JM Smucker's pet food lines including Meow Mix, Milk-Bone, Kibbles N Bits and Pup-Peroni.

It was a position he held for nearly five years prior to April when Post completed its purchase of the pet brands in a deal worth $1.2 billion and named him chief commercial officer. Tanner, who became CEO of Simply Good Foods in June, also worked at JM Smucker and Big Heart Pet Brands earlier in his career. Next month, Simply Good Foods will shift its current Chief Marketing Officer Linda Zink to the new position of chief growth officer.

Zink has been a Simply Good Foods executive since 2013, having joined after stints at Broomfield-based food company White Wave and at The Clorox Co., Bath & Body Works and The Kellogg Co. Her new role at Simply Good Foods asks her to "cultivate category insights and multi-year innovation across all product forms, helping to shape the company's longer-term product portfolio choices and strategy. All three of the executives in the restructuring will report directly to Tanner.

The leadership change doesn't make separate business divisions out of the Atkins and Quest brands.