Irene Rosenfeld

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Irene Rosenfeld, 2009.

© World Economic Forum—swiss-image.ch/Sebastian Derungs

Irene Rosenfeldis an American business executive, who was CEO (2006–17) of processed-foods giant Kraft Foods Inc. and, after the company’s restructuring in 2012, of Mondelēz International. Under her leadership, Kraft, already the largest food-products company in the United States, expanded its holdings abroad and radically reorganized the marketing of its vast array of snack and grocery brands.

Born to an accountant father and a homemaker mother, Rosenfeld grew up in suburban Long Island, New York. After a childhood active in sports and academics, she went to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where she earned three degrees in rapid succession: a B.A. in psychology (1975), an M.S. in business (1977), and a Ph.D. in marketing and statistics (1980). While at Cornell she married fellow student Philip Rosenfeld, with whom she had two children. After his death in 1995 she remarried but kept her first married name.

Rosenfeld started her career at an advertising agency and then in 1981 joined the marketing department of General Foods Corporation, a company with a long line of packaged and frozen products, ranging from Kool-Aid fruit-flavoured beverages to Maxwell House coffee to Oscar Mayer meats. Over the following 15 years she worked up through the company, managing a number of its brands. In 1985 General Foods was bought by tobacco company Philip Morris (now the Altria Group), and over the following decade it was merged with another of Philip Morris’s acquisitions, Kraft Foods, a manufacturer of processed cheese that had also acquired numerous food product lines. In 1996 Rosenfeld was put in charge of Kraft’s entire Canadian division, broadening her experience beyond the marketing of a single brand or type of food product. She also worked on integrating the biscuit products of Nabisco, purchased by Philip Morris in 2000, into Kraft Foods, and in 2001 she was part of a committee that prepared Kraft for its first public stock offering.

In 2004 Rosenfeld left Kraft for Frito-Lay, a maker of snack products that was owned by beverage company PepsiCo, Inc. She served as Frito-Lay’s CEO and chairman for two years, during which time the company extended its product line by introducing a number of low-salt, low-fat snacks.

In 2006 Rosenfeld returned to Kraft, this time as CEO and then, following the company’s complete separation from Philip Morris in 2007, chairman of the board. She immediately set about reinvigorating the company by introducing new products, entering expanding markets abroad, and reorganizing the selling of mature American brands. In 2007 the company acquired the biscuit operations of the French company Groupe Danone, and in 2010 Rosenfeld succeeded in an aggressive takeover of British confectioner Cadbury. She then moved to split Kraft into two companies, one selling grocery items in North America (operating under the name Kraft) and the other marketing snack products around the world (Mondelēz International). The reorganization took place in 2012, and Rosenfeld became CEO of Mondelēz. She remained in that post until her retirement in 2017.