2026 Women of Excellence Profiles: Innovator
Carli Feinstein
Senior Vice President
Salt XC
Carli Feinstein is an advocate for a retail media model centered on incrementality, profitable growth and business outcomes rather than channel metrics alone. When Salt XC became Chobani's retail media agency of record, the brand was aspiring to move beyond a fragmented, ROAS-led approach to one that's fully integrated and grounded in commercial growth. Feinstein partnered with Chobani's shopper marketing and commercial growth teams to develop a strategic framework that transformed retail media from a primarily on-site activation channel into a full-funnel, omnichannel growth engine spanning more than 30 retail partners.
Feinstein championed a shift away from traditional ROAS-based evaluation toward incrementality, new buyer acquisition and long-term business impact. She led the development and adoption of layered KPI frameworks, SKU-level audience strategies, and mixed-media modeling validation that combined retailer and brand-side perspectives.
In the first year of implementation, Chobani achieved incremental sales growth more than twice the category benchmark while significantly improving incremental return — gains that were achieved through disciplined investment and optimization rather than increased spending. Under Feinstein's leadership, Chobani expanded into emerging retail media formats including in-store TV, auction-based display media and experiential retail activations. Her team also helped bring Chobani's Walmart pop-up experiences to life, creating new ways to connect retail media investment with in-store shopper engagement and brand experience.
For the launch of Chobani High Protein yogurt, a full-funnel activation strategy across CTV, social, on-site, off-site and search delivered double-digit improvements in engagement and down-funnel performance. Within the Creamers business, targeted conquesting and contextual audience strategies generated a 67% increase in ROAS on CTV-supported campaigns while driving meaningful household penetration.
Yvonne Groves
POS Manager
Mast-Jagermeister US
Yvonne Groves leads the development, procurement, inventory management and execution of point-of-sale materials for the Jagermeister and Teremana brands.
During a period of major organizational change, including the transition of procurement responsibilities to a fulfillment and sourcing partner, she emerged as a champion for process improvement. She developed standardized briefing tools, refined documentation to incorporate legal and compliance requirements, created new ways of working with external partners, and introduced greater structure and accountability throughout the procurement process — changes that improved collaboration, increased efficiency and created a stronger foundation for future growth.
Groves redesigned the company's POS catalog and inventory management structure, and developed a new catalog strategy that separated always-available Flow POS from time-sensitive program materials and introduced a dedicated customer service catalog for residual inventory. This enhanced visibility, simplified ordering, improved inventory utilization and created a more intuitive experience for internal and external stakeholders.
She also shepherded numerous innovative display concepts and merchandising solutions from initial idea through production and rollout this year, including the development of a Jagermeister bottle-shaped permanent floor rack, a Teremana non-lit sign made with unconventional substrates, oversized consumer engagement games, and multiple custom retail display solutions created specifically to better engage target consumers. She advocated for stronger functionality, improved shopper visibility, better retailer acceptance and enhanced execution quality.
Her innovative thinking consistently results in better processes, stronger execution and more meaningful retail experiences, and her ability to gain stakeholder buy-in, navigate complexity and lead implementation ensures that new ideas move beyond concept and become lasting improvements for the organization. In her nearly 11-year tenure with the company, Groves' contributions have improved operational efficiency, strengthened business processes, elevated retail execution and created scalable solutions that support future growth.
Cheyenne Joyner
Shopper Marketing Manager
Zespri
Cheyenne Joyner brings a bold, strategic mindset to every initiative, elevating not only brand presence, but also how shoppers interact with fresh produce at retail. She championed the company's Perfect Store initiative — work that has redefined how fresh fruit can show up in-store, moving beyond traditional merchandising to create visually engaging, high-impact displays designed to drive both shopper attention and conversion. By rethinking display strategy through a shopper lens, she has unlocked new opportunities to elevate the produce department and position Zespri as a premium, experience-led brand at retail.
Building on this foundation, she spearheaded the Kiwi Destination, an innovative, large-scale display concept that brings the Zespri portfolio together. A departure from standard produce merchandising, it allows the brand to "show up big" and create a disruptive shelf presence in stores. It not only captures shopper attention, but also encourages cross-product engagement and reinforces brand recognition, ultimately driving stronger basket-building behavior.
Joyner consistently challenges the status quo, identifying opportunities to strengthen impressions, deepen engagement and improve overall program effectiveness. Her approach is rooted in delivering value for both the shopper and the retailer, ensuring that every activation is strategically aligned, measurable and mutually beneficial. In addition to her strategic impact, she has played a foundational role in building and evolving Zespri's shopper marketing function over the past nearly seven years. Her experience spans displays, retail media, trade shows and promotional activations.
She is a trusted partner across sales, marketing, agency teams and retail partners. She has a relentless focus on the shopper, a willingness to challenge industry norms and the ability to translate innovative thinking into real world impact at retail.
Stefani McNansky
Senior Vice President of Insights
Monarca Snacks
Stefani McNansky has built a track record of identifying opportunities for change and turning bold ideas into actionable business strategies. Most recently, as head of category leadership at Kraft Heinz, she led a projected $100 million net sales value transformation while utilizing only $500,000 in capital investment and $500,000 in operating expense investment. In this role, she established an industry-leading vision for a more than 100-person team and translated that vision into concrete goals, objectives and roadmaps designed to deliver both short- and long-term business results.
McNansky's approach challenged traditional ways of operating by focusing on both onshore and offshore transformation efforts, including upskilling talent, segmenting portfolios and resources through organizational restructuring, and building an offshore team in Ahmedabad, India, to develop global capabilities.
During her role as head of growth strategy, she led the development of Kraft Heinz's 10-year strategy, developed a global portfolio segmentation taxonomy, and prepared the investment thesis for mergers and acquisitions — efforts that demonstrated her ability to think beyond immediate business needs and create frameworks that support long-term growth and strategic decision-making.
Earlier in her career, McNansky led an assortment management project that reduced SKU count by 20% while growing net sales value by 1% through a shopper- and category-focused approach. She also optimized the efficiency of Kraft Heinz's retail organization by 30% with reduced cost and resources and led retail integration efforts during the Kraft-Heinz merger involving a $100 million budget and more than 1,000 people.
Across multiple leadership roles, McNansky has consistently identified opportunities to rethink existing processes, develop new strategies and guide organizations through significant transformation. She joined Monarca in June 2025 after more than 14 years at Kraft Heinz.
Elizabeth Perryman
Head of Marketing and Sales Enablement
Albertsons Media Collective
With more than 17 years of experience in media and marketing, Elizabeth Perryman identifies emerging opportunities, builds organizational alignment around bold ideas, and successfully leads those ideas from concept to adoption. She led the development and launch of Albertsons Media Collective's groundbreaking branded entertainment model in partnership with Procter & Gamble and Minivela.
Rather than using shopper insights only to optimize campaigns, she helped champion a first-of-its-kind approach that integrated retailer intelligence into the creation of original entertainment content from the outset. The result was Rico's Tacos, an industry-first branded entertainment program that pioneered a new category within retail media: episodic, scripted content informed by retailer shopper insights and distributed through a retail media network. The campaign generated more than 183.4 million unique impressions, proving both consumer engagement and market adoption while demonstrating a new model for connecting brands, shoppers and commerce.
Perryman also played a critical role in building new capabilities that accelerated the growth of Albertsons Media Collective. As the organization scaled, she established and launched the sales enablement function, creating foundational programs, tools, messaging and resources that empowered commercial teams to effectively communicate its value to partners and advertisers. She further helped lead the launch and market introduction of the company's in-store screens network, creating innovative opportunities for brands to engage shoppers at the point of purchase.
She championed measurement and reporting capabilities that enabled advertisers to better understand campaign effectiveness and business outcomes, and spearheaded communications and industry engagement efforts around a retail media standardization initiative. Working collaboratively with retailers, publishers and advertisers, she helped drive the development and publication of a framework addressing performance measurement, product specifications, third-party verification and capabilities.
Carley Smith
Senior Brand and Product Manager
Whirlpool
Carley Smith has spent her entire career at the home appliance company. She has fundamentally transformed how Whirlpool Corp.'s CPG business approaches retail media, shifting the organization from legacy campaign management to an AI-powered, always-on optimization model that has improved incremental media performance, strengthened competitive position across key consumable categories, and created a durable operating model for data-driven decision-making.
Smith recognized that the company's CPG retail media organization had an attribution problem: ROAS, as traditionally measured, does not capture incremental sales. It counts purchases that would have happened regardless of the ad, inflating apparent returns and masking where media investment is truly generating net new revenue. She led her team’s transition to incremental ROAS, a framework that isolates only the sales that would not have occurred without advertising. This shift required building confidence across internal stakeholders in a measurement approach that produces more conservative looking numbers in the short term. Importantly, those numbers reflect true net new sales, making every dollar reported under iROAS directly accretive to the business.
That distinction matters for long-term investment decisions, and Smith made it the foundation of how her team reports performance. Championing AI-powered optimization, she led the Whirlpool CPG team's adoption of CommerceIQ's AI-powered retail media platform, replacing periodic bid adjustments and static reporting with continuous optimization driven by real-time signals across bidding dynamics, product availability, digital shelf conditions and consumer demand. Smith also guided the governance structures and reporting cadences that have made this transformation durable, including monthly strategic summaries, budget review cycles and cross-functional reporting anchored in data rather than intuition. Her team's performance materials are now the primary tool for communicating retail media ROI to senior leadership.
