Julie Smolyansky

Chairperson, President, & CEO, Lifeway Foods

JULIE SMOLYANSKY became the youngest female CEO of a publicly held firm when she took over Lifeway Foods at the age of 27 in 2002. Since then, Julie has continued the company’s growth trajectory with creative product development and marketing, bringing an Eastern European product into the U.S. mainstream and growing annual company revenues from $12 million when she took over, to over $160 million by 2023. Under her leadership, the company has expanded distribution throughout the United States, Mexico, the UK, and Ireland as well as portions of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Fortune magazine included Julie in their prestigious 40 under 40 list. They also cited her as one of the 55 Most Influential Women on X (formerly Twitter). And Fast Company showcased her as one of their Most Creative People in Business.
She is a graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Julie serves as a member of the United Nations Foundation Global Entrepreneurs Council and was part of the 2015 class of Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. She has produced several documentaries, including “The Homestretch,” “Honor Diaries” and “The Hunting Ground.” In 2013 Julie co-founded a non-profit, Test400k, an organization dedicated to advocating ending the backlog of 400,000 untested rape kits in the United States. She released her first book, The Kefir Cookbook: An Ancient Healing Superfood for Modern Life, Recipes from My Family Table and Around the World in 2018. She lives in Chicago and is the mother of two girls.