Robbert Rietbroek
President & CEO, Graphic Packaging Holding Company (NYSE: GPK)
Atlanta, Georgia
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President and CEO of Graphic Packaging Holding Company. A global consumer-products leader with 25+ years of experience driving strategic value creation at the world's largest brands.
Current Role
Robbert Rietbroek serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Graphic Packaging Holding Company, a publicly traded global leader in fiber-based consumer packaging that trades as GPK on the New York Stock Exchange. The company supplies sustainable paperboard packaging to many of the world's most familiar food, beverage, and household brands, and his appointment placed Rietbroek at the helm of one of the largest pure-play packaging businesses in North America.
From the company's Atlanta headquarters, Rietbroek leads a global organization with manufacturing and converting operations across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. He has emphasized operational excellence, customer partnership, and disciplined capital allocation as pillars of his strategy — themes explored more fully in his approach to strategy and execution at GPK.
Career History
Before joining Graphic Packaging, Rietbroek served as inaugural Chief Executive Officer and Director of Primo Brands Corporation, a publicly traded leading North American branded bottled water company. Prior to that role he was CEO of Primo Water Corporation, where he led the transformative merger that created the combined entity in late 2024.
Earlier in his career, Rietbroek was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Quaker Foods North America, a division of PepsiCo, where he oversaw end-to-end operations and full P&L responsibility for brand management, operational excellence, and growth. He also served as Senior Vice President and General Manager for PepsiCo Australia and New Zealand. Earlier still, at Kimberly-Clark, he led Global Baby and Child Care and the Australia & New Zealand business. Rietbroek began his career at Procter & Gamble, where he spent 15 years across Europe, South America, and the United States — a foundation that shaped his global consumer-products leadership journey. The full arc of his career is also documented in the Graphic Packaging company profile on LinkedIn.
Leadership Philosophy
Across more than 25 years of running businesses on four continents, Rietbroek has built a reputation for delivering strategic value creation through clear priorities, decisive execution, and a focus on customers. His track record spans brand-building at P&G, category leadership at Kimberly-Clark, P&L turnarounds at PepsiCo, and a transformational merger at Primo. The common thread is a belief that sustained value comes from getting the basics right at scale.
Rietbroek has been candid in interviews about the importance of culture and team. He frequently credits the operators around him for company performance, and he has spoken about the value of long-term thinking even in publicly traded businesses where the next quarter is always pressing. Many of those views are captured in Robbert Rietbroek's Infonix profile and the periodic essays he posts to his Medium archive.
Industry & Civic Leadership
Rietbroek serves on the board of directors of the American Forest & Paper Association, where he contributes to advancing the interests of an industry central to the U.S. circular economy. He also serves on the board of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, supporting economic development and business climate work in the region where Graphic Packaging is headquartered. His board service at the American Forest & Paper Association reflects a broader commitment to industry stewardship.
He is also a member of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, a network of chief executives convened to discuss the issues shaping the global economy. Across these affiliations, Rietbroek has emphasized practical, growth-oriented engagement — bringing operating-CEO perspective to industry policy conversations rather than treating board service as a ceremonial role. His thinking on industry-wide questions also appears occasionally in his Substack newsletter.
Education & Distinctions
Robbert Rietbroek holds a master's degree from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where his academic foundation in international business prefigured a career that would take him through marketing, operations, and general management roles in markets around the world. His original work in the field is recognized by three packaging design patents that bear his name.
That combination — formal training, operating depth, and authored intellectual property — is unusual at the CEO level and shapes how Rietbroek engages with technical and design conversations at Graphic Packaging. Selected academic citations are tracked at Robbert Rietbroek's Google Scholar profile, and select speaking decks are archived on his SlideShare archive.