Walgreens Boots Alliance names Roz Brewer new CEO

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jan 27, 2021

Health & beauty retail giant Walgreens Boots Alliance has named Rosalind (Roz) Brewer as its new CEO, effective on March 15. She’ll join the board too as she succeeds CEO Stefano Pessina, who’s becoming executive chairman.

The company, which owns the giant American Walgreens business and the dominant UK beauty retailer Boots, said Brewer “brings to WBA a proven track record of leadership and operational expertise at multi-national corporations, with deep experience in strategic development, marketing, digital transformation and loyalty, innovation and technology, supply chain and store development.”

She was most recently COO, president and board member at Starbucks. And before that, she was president and CEO of Walmart Inc’s Sam’s Club members-only warehouse channel. While there, she “successfully grew membership, transformed merchandise and amplified the use of digital technology to enable a seamless shopping experience at scale, which led to sequentially improved comp sales”.

She’s currently ranked #27 on Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.

Her retail experience is important, particularly for the Boots business that has struggled, not only with pandemic-linked issues, but with wider sales and profits slumps before that.

Pessina has been CEO of the company for six years following the merger between Walgreens and Alliance Boots in December 2014.