2024: A veteran CEO of Hormel Foods, Jeff Ettinger is leading the University of Minnesota following president Joan Gabel’s stormy tenure and resignation. As an interim, he’s responsible for advancing enrollment, diversity, climate, and other goals in the MPact 2025 strategic plan. Along with a governor’s task force, he’s weighing how best to structure and fund the university’s health programs and whether the U should buy back facilities from Fairview Health. Academic health, he says, should “improve health care quality, accessibility, and equity for all of us, while training the health professionals we all depend on.” He wants to maintain the U’s standing as a top 10 research university, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually.
2014: Jeffrey Ettinger showed he's nuts about protein of all kinds, leading Hormel during its acquisition this year of Skippy peanut butter from Unilever. Skippy gives Hormel a vegetarian protein that's extremely popular in the United States, and a growing staple around the world. An attorney who has worked at Hormel since 1989, Ettinger keeps Hormel cooking. He wins kudos for its results and his leadership, winning the title of Responsible CEO of the Year--one of four--by Corporate Responsibility. Hormel reported a record 2012, growing to $8.2 billion in sales and rising to the 15th-largest public company in Minnesota.
- Lourenco Goncalves