In the last 18 months, some of the most consequential moves in food and beverage have been made by women.
A new CEO took the helm of PepsiCo’s $21 billion U.S. Foods business. General Mills built a Chief Operating Officer role and appointed the first woman in the company’s 160-year history to its board. Two founder-led companies went public on the Nasdaq within three months. A food safety scientist was confirmed for an unprecedented second term running USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
This list recognizes 20 senior women in the industry whose moves we believe other executives are paying attention to right now, maybe even adjusting strategies based on their example. We evaluated executives across seven influence signals:
LinkedIn platform reach
Earnings call narrative-setting
M&A deal-making
Conference keynote invitations
Trade press visibility
Policy and regulatory shaping
Transformation impact
The 20 women on this list run public-company P&Ls worth tens of billions. They lead private-company operations whose strategies the Fortune 500 studies. They sit at the head of trade groups shaping how the industry responds to Washington. And several are founders building categories the legacy giants are scrambling to follow.
Here are the 20 women shaping food and beverage in 2026.
1. Dana McNabb, Incoming COO, General Mills
In May 2026, General Mills announced that Dana McNabb would become its Chief Operating Officer effective June 1. She also joined the board of directors, making her the first General Mills executive who is a woman to sit on the board in the company’s 160-year history.
McNabb is the first General Mills executive to hold the COO title since Jeff Harmening vacated it in 2017 to become CEO. Her remit is unusually broad. She oversees North America Retail, North America Pet, and International and North America Foodservice, in addition to the Digital & Technology, Innovation, Technology & Quality, Strategy and Growth, and Supply Chain teams. That covers essentially the entire operating footprint of a $19.5 billion company.
McNabb is the heir apparent to CEO Jeff Harmening. Her 27-year General Mills career started in Canada in 1999 and runs through Cereal Partners Worldwide, U.S. Cereal President, Group President of Europe & Australia, and Chief Strategy & Growth Officer before her most recent role as Group President of North America Retail and Pet. Few executives have her breadth across both strategy and operations.
McNabb steps into expanded responsibility just as Big Food companies face declining volumes, GLP-1 disruption, and Make America Healthy Again regulatory pressure. Whoever the General Mills board chooses as Harmening’s successor will lead the company through a period of significant category disruption.
2. Beth Ford, President & CEO, Land O’Lakes
Beth Ford has turned a policy issue into a personal platform, which is something few food CEOs attempt.
As chair of the Business Roundtable’s immigration committee, Ford has become one of the most visible CEO voices on the agricultural labor crisis, putting her in direct conversation with lawmakers shaping workforce policy for the food supply chain. Her August 2025 TIME op-ed “A Storm Is Gathering in American Agriculture” is a particularly powerful piece and was shared widely on LinkedIn.
She has made immigration “a now issue,” in her words. At the October 2025 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she warned that current enforcement could trigger “a black swan event” for U.S. agriculture, backed by Texas A&M data showing nearly 80% of U.S. milk supply depends on producers that employ immigrant labor. She named a specific policy fix: year-round farm worker visas.
Ford has been willing to spend political capital on a problem her members can’t solve alone. That’s separate from the TED talk, the Fortune Most Powerful Women recognition, and the Conference Board panels, but it’s the work that’s made her a CEO Washington listens to.
3. Rachel Ferdinando, CEO, PepsiCo U.S. Foods
In January 2025, Rachel Ferdinando took the helm of PepsiCo U.S. Foods. The role gives her operational authority over Frito-Lay, Quaker, and the rest of PepsiCo’s U.S. foods portfolio. PepsiCo Foods North America, the segment that includes her U.S. business plus Canada Foods, reported $27.5 billion in net revenue in 2025. By scale alone, it’s one of the largest food-business roles held by any woman in the industry.
Ferdinando joined PepsiCo in 2017 from Kimberly-Clark, where she was Vice President and Global Sector Leader. She started at PepsiCo as Chief Marketing Officer of Frito-Lay North America, then ran PepsiCo Foods Canada as President, before her promotion to the U.S. role.
Her appointment came as PepsiCo restructured its North America food businesses, bringing Frito-Lay and Quaker under a single PepsiCo Foods North America segment. Ferdinando’s mandate is to drive growth in a category where the largest snack brands face soft volumes and shifting consumer preferences. Her decisions on innovation, pricing, and manufacturing footprint help set the competitive baseline for snack companies across the industry.
She is also a barometer for where the snack industry is moving. If permissible snacking and functional ingredients turn into real growth drivers, Ferdinando’s portfolio is where it’ll show up first.
4. Athina Kanioura, CEO, Latin America Foods & EVP, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer, PepsiCo
In December 2025, PepsiCo announced that Athina Kanioura would add CEO of Latin America Foods to her existing role as Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, effective December 28. The Latin America Foods segment reported $10.6 billion in net revenue in 2024, making it one of PepsiCo’s larger operating businesses.
Kanioura came to PepsiCo from Accenture, where she spent 15 years, in the role of Chief Analytics Officer and Global Head of Applied Intelligence. Her PepsiCo transformation work has centered on AI integration and digital capabilities. She succeeds Paula Santilli, who retired after 35 years at PepsiCo.
Kanioura now sits in a seat where she can both write strategy and operate against it, at a moment when AI integration in product development, manufacturing, and consumer data has become an executive priority across Big Food.
5. Mindy Brashears, Under Secretary for Food Safety, USDA
Mindy Brashears holds the only seat on this list that isn’t a corporate CEO role. She runs U.S. food safety, and her decisions over the next four years will shape every meat and poultry processor in the country.
On December 18, 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed Brashears in a 53-42 vote for an unprecedented second term as USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety. The position oversees the Food Safety and Inspection Service and its 10,000-plus inspectors and scientists. Brashears held the role briefly in the first Trump administration and is returning from her position as a Texas Tech professor and Director of the International Center for Food Industry Excellence.
Her stated priorities are Salmonella and Listeria. In her Senate hearing, she advocated for a science-based approach, just as she did when she co-authored USDA-FSIS’s 2020 Roadmap to Reducing Salmonella. The framework that replaced hers, developed under the Biden administration, was scrapped in April 2025. Brashears is now rebuilding from scratch.
For meat and poultry processors, Brashears is the regulator whose Salmonella and Listeria decisions will set the rules of the game for the next four years. She spent her career inside both the science and the policy, which is unusual for a USDA Under Secretary at this level.
6. Kimberli Carroll, President & CEO, Ruiz Foods
Kimberli Carroll’s career is the kind that doesn’t show up on most “top executives” lists. She spent 23 years at Ruiz Foods, rising from operations to COO and then to President and CEO of the largest frozen Mexican food manufacturer in the United States.
Carroll was inducted into the Convenience Store News Hall of Fame as the first-ever female supplier executive to receive the honor. She led the most successful new product launch in Ruiz Foods’ history. D Magazine’s Dallas 500 named her to its 2025 list.
With over 4,000 employees across five plants and brands including El Monterey and Tornados, Ruiz Foods operates at a scale that’s big enough to matter, but private enough to move fast. Carroll’s trajectory of two decades climbing within a single mid-market manufacturer is exactly the career path that makes food manufacturing leadership distinctive.
7. Maria Stipp, CEO, Suja Life
On May 7, 2026, Maria Stipp rang the Nasdaq opening bell. Suja Life priced its IPO at $21, the low end of its range, and the company raised $186.7 million, one of a small number of PE-backed functional beverage companies to reach the public markets in recent years.
Stipp joined Suja in February 2024 from Sapporo-Stone Brewing, where she doubled the business and led its sale to Sapporo. Before that, she ran Lagunitas Brewing. Two prior exits made her appointment to Suja a strong signal that an IPO was the goal under Paine Schwartz Partners’ ownership.
Suja generated $326.6 million in fiscal 2025 revenue, up 26% year over year. Its vertically integrated farm-to-table production from a 270,000-square-foot Oceanside facility is a structural difference from peers in the better-for-you beverage category that rely heavily on co-manufacturers.
8. Carrie Jones-Barber, CEO, Dawn Food Products
Carrie Jones-Barber joined Dawn Foods in 1985 and became CEO in 2006, making her one of the longest-tenured CEOs in the U.S. baking sector. Dawn is family-owned, doesn’t file 10-Ks, and operates at a scale that often gets missed by public-company lists. Under Jones-Barber’s leadership, it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar global operation with a workforce in the thousands and customers including Krispy Kreme and Starbucks.
She rose from sales representative to CIO to International President to CEO. In 2024, she was appointed to the American Bakers Association Board of Directors for the 2024-26 term.
Jones-Barber’s tenure shows what mid-market food manufacturing leadership looks like when influence comes from operating depth instead of public-market visibility.
9. Cassandra Curtis, Co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Once Upon a Farm
Cassandra Curtis started Once Upon a Farm in 2015, mixing baby food recipes in her kitchen with cofounder Ari Raz. Jennifer Garner and former Annie’s CEO John Foraker joined the founding team in 2017, with Foraker stepping in as CEO. On February 6, 2026, Curtis stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with her cofounders, watching their company go public. The IPO raised $197.9 million and valued Once Upon a Farm at $724 million. Shares closed up 17% on the first day and were up roughly 40% within three days of listing.
Once Upon a Farm reported a 43.7% revenue surge in its first quarter as a public company, with the baby business alone growing 112% year over year. Its 2026 net sales guidance now sits between $313 million and $323 million. The brand started as cold-pressed baby food sold in farmers markets and now sits in 19,000 stores.
Curtis matters because she built the company that helped prove organic, fresh, no-added-sugar food for children could compete at scale against legacy baby food brands. Her arc is one founders in the better-for-you category study closely. Build a credible product, bring in operators who can scale it, and stay in the building through the IPO. She’s one of the few female food founders who stayed inside the company she started all the way through its public-company chapter.
10. Darlene Nicosia, CEO, Maker’s Pride
Most consumers haven’t heard of Maker’s Pride, the company formerly known as Hearthside Food Solutions. It rebranded in March 2025 after emerging from Chapter 11 with approximately $2 billion less in debt. But if you’ve eaten a granola bar, cookie, or snack from a major brand, there’s a reasonable chance the company made it. With 27 facilities, it’s one of the largest contract manufacturers in U.S. food.
Nicosia was named CEO in August 2022 and continues to lead the company under its new name. She brings 30-plus years of CPG experience, most of it at The Coca-Cola Company, where she most recently served as President of the Canada & Northeast U.S. Zone, with earlier roles as Corporate Vice President, Chief Procurement Officer, and Vice President, Commercial Products Supply. She held earlier operations leadership roles at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods.
As more food brands outsource production, co-manufacturing becomes more strategically important. Nicosia took the company through Chapter 11 and out the other side under a new name. Her work sits at one of the industry’s recurring questions: how much of the making do brand owners still need to do themselves?
11. Julie Smolyansky, President & CEO, Lifeway Foods
Julie Smolyansky became the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded U.S. company when she took over Lifeway Foods at age 27 after the sudden death of her father, the company’s founder. That was 2002. She has run Lifeway ever since, and the company is now posting record numbers.
Lifeway reported a record $212.5 million in net sales for 2025, up 13.7% year over year (or 19% on a comparable basis), with net income up 54% and a sixth consecutive year of volume-led growth. Growth came from product innovations including Muscle Mates, Lifeway Kefir Butter, and the earlier Probiotic Smoothie + Collagen, the first probiotic collagen smoothie with kefir cultures. Smolyansky was named one of Progressive Grocer’s 2025 Top Women in Grocery.
Smolyansky’s influence cuts across functional foods and gut health, but the story underneath is the immigrant family that built the brand. Her father came to the U.S. from Ukraine and started Lifeway in 1986. Smolyansky has spent 24 years turning a single kefir company into the U.S. category leader, with Lifeway now holding roughly 95% of the U.S. kefir market.
She is also a frequent industry voice on women’s leadership and the policy debates around functional ingredients.
12. Shawna Nelson, CEO, Organic Valley
On March 28, 2025, Shawna Nelson became the fourth CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farmer-owned cooperative. She is the first woman to hold the role in the cooperative’s history. She is also the executive who started at Organic Valley as an intern in May 2005. Twenty years from intern to CEO is the kind of trajectory cooperative organizations exist to enable.
Nelson oversees the dairy pools of more than 1,600 farmer-member-owners. She rose through marketing, sales analysis, recruitment, employee relations, field operations, and dairy pool management before becoming Executive Vice President of Membership, the role that gave her direct accountability for the cooperative’s farmer relationships.
Her appointment matters because Organic Valley sits in a category nobody else operates the same way. Dairy is consolidating as family farms exit the business, and the cooperative model, along with Organic Valley’s commitment to premium organic farmer-owned production, is one of the few structural alternatives to that commoditization. How Nelson leads through the next five years will signal whether the model can scale or get pressured into the same consolidation everyone else faces.
13. Melissa Hockstad, President & CEO, Consumer Brands Association
Melissa Hockstad became President & CEO of the Consumer Brands Association in January 2025. Since then, the industry she represents (every major food, beverage, household, and personal care brand in the country) entered the most volatile regulatory environment it has faced in a generation.
Hockstad joined CBA from the American Cleaning Institute, where she ran the trade group for eight years. Her resume runs through the Plastics Industry Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and LyondellBasell. She is one of the few association CEOs in Washington with a materials-science engineering background.
Her job, day one, has been to broker the industry’s response to the Make America Healthy Again agenda, including the FDA’s stated intent to eliminate artificial food dyes. In March 2025, she met directly with HHS Secretary Kennedy alongside CEOs from PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Smucker’s, Tyson, and Kraft Heinz. She wrote to CBA members afterward that “decision time is imminent.”
Hockstad sits at the head of one of the most consequential trade association seats in food and beverage right now, given the regulatory volatility ahead. Much of what CBA’s members do over the next four years will pass through her advocacy.
14. Becca Millstein, CEO & Co-founder, Fishwife
Becca Millstein co-founded Fishwife in 2020 with Caroline Goldfarb. By 2026, TIME named it one of the 100 most influential companies in the world. Fishwife is one of the brands that helped turn premium, design-forward tinned seafood into a fast-growing U.S. category.
Persistence Market Research estimates the global canned seafood market at $10.6 billion in 2026. Fishwife translated the European conservas tradition into a U.S. retail product, complete with the Fly By Jing chili crisp salmon collaboration, a cookbook, Costco distribution, and a 2024 Shark Tank appearance.
Millstein has done something hard in food: made a quiet legacy category genuinely interesting to a new generation of consumers.
Forbes also named her to its 30 Under 30 list. She is one of the younger founder-CEOs to land on a food and beverage influence list this year, and one who built her category from a near-standing start.
15. Cathy Burns, President & CEO, International Fresh Produce Association
Cathy Burns runs the global trade body for fresh produce and floral. She got there by orchestrating one of the most ambitious trade-association consolidations in food industry history.
In 2022, the Produce Marketing Association merged with United Fresh to form the International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA). Burns, who had been Produce Marketing Association’s (PMA’s) CEO since 2016, led the integration. IFPA now represents more than 3,000 member companies across 60 countries, covering every segment of the global produce supply chain from seed producer to retailer.
Burns started her career bagging groceries at a Hannaford-owned Shop n’ Save in Bangor, Maine, while she was in high school. She rose through Hannaford and then Delhaize to become President of Food Lion, leading the chain along with Harveys and Reid’s, before joining PMA in 2013. Her trajectory is the produce industry’s story compressed into a single career.
She delivered the ”Fight for Fresh” address at IFPA’s annual Washington Conference, where she sets the industry’s policy agenda before members head to Capitol Hill. Her own Senate testimony on the farm bill is part of that record. Burns is among the executive voices the global produce industry turns to when food policy enters the conversation.
16. Deanna Jurgens, President & CEO, Armanino Foods of Distinction
Deanna Jurgens took over Armanino Foods on May 12, 2025. The hire reads like a deliberate bet by Armanino’s board on a particular kind of operator, one with both legacy Big Food credibility and disruptor-brand growth experience.
Jurgens spent 16 years at PepsiCo, leading Frito-Lay’s largest U.S. region. She left to become President of North America and Global Chief Growth Officer at Beyond Meat, where she developed the partnerships with McDonald’s and YUM Brands that defined plant-based protein’s mainstream rollout. Before joining Armanino, she was Chief Sales Officer at Bonduelle Americas, where she led the $650 million fresh business to its largest share gains in five years. Fortune named her to its Most Powerful Women Next Gen list.
Armanino is a specialty frozen pasta and sauce manufacturer trading on the OTCQX. Small company, big-company executive. The pairing is the point. Jurgens brings disciplined P&L experience from inside a CPG giant alongside disruptor-brand growth credentials, a combination that’s relatively rare in mid-market food leadership.
17. Julie Anna Potts, President & CEO, Meat Institute
Julie Anna Potts leads the largest meat trade group in the United States. The Meat Institute represents the companies that produce more than 95% of the country’s red meat and turkey. Potts is the principal voice engaging with USDA, FSIS, and Congress on the regulatory issues affecting protein production, from animal welfare to trade policy to food safety.
In January 2021, Potts was appointed to USDA’s Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee, a working seat that gives the Meat Institute direct input into U.S. trade negotiating priorities.
She represents the industry on Capitol Hill at a moment when meat processing is squeezed by immigration enforcement and regulatory uncertainty over Salmonella standards, with the political debate over consolidation in protein processing layered on top.
She is one of the more policy-fluent association leaders in food. The Meat Institute’s positions are typically among the first the industry hears on major regulatory questions.
18. Racquel Harris Mason, President, North America, LIPTON Teas and Infusions
Racquel Harris Mason became North America President of LIPTON Teas and Infusions in June 2023. She joined from Coca-Cola, where she spent 14 years in senior commercial and brand roles, including time as SVP and General Manager for the McDonald’s Division USA. In 2025, Progressive Grocer named her its CPG Trailblazer at its Top Women in Grocery awards.
Her current assignment is leading Lipton’s first major brand refresh in more than a decade. Lipton spun out of Unilever in July 2022 and now operates as an independent global business owned by CVC Capital Partners, which acquired the tea portfolio for nearly $5 billion. Lipton remains the number-one tea brand globally, and the rebrand will help determine whether it holds that position or cedes ground to functional beverage challengers and RTD competitors.
Harris Mason’s job is to keep Lipton relevant without alienating its loyalists, at a moment when the broader tea category is being reshaped by functional and adaptogenic products.
For food and beverage executives studying brand repositioning at scale, this is a case study worth watching.
19. Stephanie Stuckey, CEO, Stuckey’s
Stuckey’s was founded in 1937 by Stephanie Stuckey’s grandfather, W.S. Stuckey Sr., as a pecan stand in Eastman, Georgia. By the 1970s it had grown to over 350 roadside stores. The family sold the business in 1964. In 1985, Stephanie’s father brought it back into the family.
Then in November 2019, Stephanie used her life savings to buy the company from her father for $500,000. She had spent her career as a trial lawyer, a Georgia state representative, and the Director of Sustainability for the City of Atlanta. She had no business background. She knew the rebuilding process would be an uphill battle, but she had enough passion and determination to successfully revive the “85-year-old startup.”
Six years later, she has rebuilt the company into a working CPG business with a Wrens, Georgia pecan processing and candy-making facility, brand presence in roughly 5,000 retail stores, and a substantial social media following she’s used to document the rebuild. Her storytelling about American manufacturing, family business, and rural Georgia has made her a regular on industry stages and podcasts.
Stuckey matters because mid-market food executives can learn a lot from her path. Acquire a heritage brand, restore its supply chain, and rebuild emotional connection through founder-led storytelling. She did it without private equity, a celebrity co-founder, or a venture round.
Her story is also a counterweight to the consolidation thesis. Sometimes the brand that nobody believes in still has a market, if the right person believes in it again.
20. Kathy Fortmann, CEO, Amyris
Kathy Fortmann runs Amyris, one of the better-known precision fermentation companies emerging from the post-bankruptcy cycle. Amyris emerged from Chapter 11 reorganization in 2024 with new ownership, a new board, and Fortmann at the helm, effective May 2024.
The case for including her here isn’t Amyris’s revenue, which is modest by Big Food standards. It’s the trajectory of food ingredients over the next decade. The largest food companies are testing precision fermentation across sugar reduction, sodium reduction, clean-label reformulation, and natural colors at scale.
Fortmann’s resume fits that moment. She held senior positions at DuPont, Cargill, FrieslandCampina Ingredients, and International Flavors & Fragrances before serving as CEO of ACOMO N.V. from 2021 to 2023. She has run multi-billion-dollar global ingredients businesses and now leads a synthetic biology company at the moment its category is moving from beauty and pharma into food.
As she told the Minnesota Star Tribune in January 2026: “We’re at an inflection point. What’s driving that is moving beyond the scope of beauty products and pharma into more flavors and fragrances and food ingredients and material science.”
Precision fermentation isn’t yet a top-of-mind topic for most food manufacturing executives. For the ones tracking ingredient innovation seriously, Fortmann is among the operators worth watching.
