This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. (December 2020) |
Julie Smolyansky (born 1975) is a Ukrainian-American businesswoman. She is the CEO of Illinois-based dairy company Lifeway Foods.
Smolyansky was born in Kyiv, Ukraine (then Ukrainian SSR), to Jewish parents Ludmila and Michael Smolyansky. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was one. [1]
Smolyansky earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996. [2]
Her father founded the Kefir company Lifeway Foods in 1986. [3] In 1997, Smolyansky joined the business. After he died of a heart attack in 2002, [4] Julie, aged 27, became the youngest CEO of a publicly traded firm. [5] She, along with her brother as CFO, transformed the company into a multinational firm, growing its revenue from $12 million to $130 million in 2015. [6]
Smolyansky was featured on Fortune's 2014 40 under 40 list. [7]
Smolyansky has served on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
Smolyansky has been active in the conversation about sexual violence. She has supported several documentaries covering the violence against girls in Muslim-majority countries. [8] She is also the co-founder of Test400k which is a non-profit dedicated to eliminating the backlog of 400,000 untested rape kits in the U.S. and stop violence against women. [9]
The Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, commonly known as ADM, is an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation founded in 1902 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The company operates more than 270 plants and 420 crop procurement facilities worldwide, where cereal grains and oilseeds are processed into products used in food, beverage, nutraceutical, industrial, and animal feed markets worldwide.
Ryder System, Inc. is an American transportation and logistics company. It is known for its fleet of commercial rental trucks.
Kraft Foods Inc. was a multinational confectionery, food and beverage conglomerate. It marketed many brands in more than 170 countries. Twelve of its brands annually earned more than $1 billion worldwide: Cadbury, Jacobs, Kraft, LU, Maxwell House, Milka, Nabisco, Oreo, Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, Trident, and Tang. Forty of its brands were at least a century old.
Oberweis Dairy, headquartered in North Aurora, Illinois, is the parent company of several dairy-related and fast food restaurant operations in the midwest region of the United States. Its businesses include a home delivery service available in parts of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, which delivers traditional dairy products, including milk, ice cream, cheese, and yogurt, as well as bacon and seasonal products.
Irene Blecker Rosenfeld is an American businesswoman who was the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Mondelēz International. Rosenfeld's career began at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, a New York City advertising agency. She later joined General Foods consumer research, and then led Frito-Lay as CEO and chairwoman.
Gail Koziara Boudreaux is an American businesswoman and athlete. In college, she played basketball for the Dartmouth from 1978 to 1982. She later served as an executive for a number of companies such as Aetna, BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois (2002), and UnitedHealth Group (2008). In 2020, she was ranked tenth on the Forbes list of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women". From 2008 to 2014, she was on the Fortune list of powerful women, peaking at No. 25. In 2015, she formed her own healthcare consulting company, GKB Global Health, LLC. In 2017, she became CEO of Elevance Health, now the second-largest American company with a woman CEO.
Julie L. Wainwright is an e-commerce entrepreneur. She is the founder and the former CEO of The RealReal, an online marketplace for authenticated luxury consignment.
Michael Smolyansky was an American businessman. He was the chairman, president and CEO of Lifeway Foods, Inc., a dairy company based in Morton Grove, Illinois. He founded the company in 1986.
Lifeway Foods is an Illinois based health food company founded in 1986. They are a leading U.S. supplier of kefir and fermented probiotic products to support the microbiome.
Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty is an American business executive who was executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She was previously chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the first woman to head the company. She retired from IBM on December 31, 2020, after a near-40 year career there. Before becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and subsequently headed global sales, marketing, and strategy.
Denise M. Morrison is an American business executive who served as president and chief executive officer of Campbell Soup Company from 2011 through 2018. Named the "21st Most Powerful Woman in Business" by Fortune magazine in 2011, Morrison was elected a director of Campbell in October 2010. She became Campbell's 12th leader in the company's 140-year history. Morrison retired from Campbell in May 2018.
Mondelez International, Inc., styled as Mondelēz International, is an American multinational confectionery, food, holding, beverage and snack food company based in Chicago. Mondelez has an annual revenue of about $26.5 billion and operates in approximately 160 countries. It ranked No. 108 in the 2021 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
TreeHouse Foods Inc. is a multinational food processing company specializing in producing private label packaged foods headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois. Created in 2005 and consisting entirely of acquisitions, in 2010 the company had sales of $2 billion and employed over 4,000 people at 20 facilities. Food Processing magazine named TreeHouse Foods their 2010 Processor of the Year, calling them "the biggest company you never heard of". In 2015, the company was the 37th-largest food and beverage company in North America. In 2018, TreeHouse Foods was ranked No. 446 on the Fortune 500 list. In 2020, it dropped to No. 552 into the Fortune 1000 list.
Tracy Britt Cool is an American business executive and entrepreneur who was widely noted as a Warren Buffett protégé. She chaired four Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries before co-founding Kanbrick, a private equity firm, in 2020.
Kristi Ross is an entrepreneur based in Chicago. She is co-CEO and President of tastytrade, Inc., a financial media company and parent company to tastyworks, an online brokerage firm; Quiet Foundation, Inc., a registered investment advisory firm; the Small Exchange, Inc., a futures exchange awaiting CFTC approval; and dough, LLC, a new fee free online brokerage firm launching sometime in 2019.
Catherine Engelbert is an American business executive and Commissioner of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). Before joining the WNBA, she had been with Deloitte for 33 years, including as its first female CEO from 2015 to 2019.
Mary Laschinger is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Veritiv.
Katherine M. Gehl is an American businesswoman and published author. She was the president and CEO of her family-owned company, Gehl Foods, Inc. She served as a member of the board of directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a role to which she was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2010. She later founded the Institute for Political Innovation.
SkinnyPop is an American brand of dairy-free popcorn currently owned by Hershey Co. after it acquired its former owner, Amplify Snack Brands Inc. in 2017.
Julie Terese Sweet is an American business executive and attorney. She is chair and chief executive officer (CEO) of Accenture, a multinational professional services company.