Laxman Narasimhan is a business executive best known in the coffee world as the chief executive of Starbucks from March 2023 to August 2024. Before leading one of the largest coffee companies on the planet, he ran the consumer-goods group Reckitt and held senior roles at PepsiCo and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. This page is a neutral, factual look at who he is, the career that led him to coffee, and what running a global cafe company actually involves.
Who is Laxman Narasimhan?
Laxman Narasimhan was born in 1967 in Pune, India, and built his working life largely across the United States, Europe and Asia. He trained first as a mechanical engineer at the College of Engineering, Pune, then earned a master's degree in international studies and an MBA in finance from the University of Pennsylvania, studying at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School. He is frequently described as multilingual, reportedly speaking several languages, a detail that fits a career spent moving between global markets.
For most of his career he has been a consumer-goods and consulting executive rather than a coffee specialist. That background matters, because it shaped how he approached the Starbucks job: as a large, complex retail and supply-chain business as much as a coffee brand. If you want the story of the company itself rather than the person, our Starbucks brand guide covers that separately.
The career path before coffee
Narasimhan's route to a global coffee chief executive role ran through management consulting and packaged goods, not through cafes. Three organisations stand out.
McKinsey & Company
He spent roughly 19 years at McKinsey & Company, the management-consulting firm, working across offices in North America, Asia and Europe and rising to a senior director role that included responsibility for the firm's New Delhi office. Consulting of this kind typically involves advising large companies on strategy, operations and growth. It gave him broad exposure to consumer and retail businesses long before he was asked to run one himself.
PepsiCo
He joined PepsiCo around 2012 and held a series of senior positions over about seven years. These reportedly included finance and regional leadership roles across its Americas and Latin America food businesses, and culminated in his appointment as PepsiCo's global chief commercial officer. That title generally spans marketing, research and development, strategy and e-commerce across a company's brands. At a food-and-beverage giant, it is a wide remit covering how products are developed and how they reach shoppers worldwide.
Reckitt
In September 2019 Narasimhan became chief executive of Reckitt (formerly Reckitt Benckiser), the UK-based maker of health, hygiene and household brands, succeeding Rakesh Kapoor. He led the company through a turnaround effort and through the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of unusual demand for many of its cleaning and hygiene products. He stepped down from Reckitt in 2022, with the company stating that he had decided to relocate back to the United States for personal and family reasons.
Laxman Narasimhan at Starbucks
Starbucks announced Narasimhan as its incoming chief executive in September 2022. At the time the company was being led on an interim basis by Howard Schultz, the long-time figure who had returned to the top job for a third time; you can read more about him in our explainer on Howard Schultz and Starbucks. Rather than start immediately, Narasimhan joined the company on 1 October 2022 to spend several months learning the business before formally taking over as CEO in March 2023, when Schultz handed the role over about two weeks ahead of the originally planned date.
His tenure is commonly associated with a company strategy branded as "Reinvention", which focused on store operations, equipment and the experience of both customers and staff, whom Starbucks calls "partners". As part of immersing himself in operations, he was reported to have earned a barista certification, which the company describes as around 40 hours of in-store training, and to have said he planned to keep working occasional shifts in stores each month. Much of his early public messaging was framed around improving the day-to-day experience behind the counter.
In August 2024 Starbucks announced that Narasimhan would step down, effective immediately, after roughly 17 months as chief executive. The company named Brian Niccol, then chief executive of Chipotle, as its incoming chairman and CEO, while chief financial officer Rachel Ruggeri served as interim chief executive during the short transition. Reporting at the time linked the change to pressure on sales and the company's share price; the internal reasoning behind any such board decision is not something this neutral summary will speculate about. For the broader picture of the business he led, see our overview of the Starbucks coffee company and its cafes.
Career and roles at a glance
The table below summarises the main chapters of his career and roughly when each took place. Dates are approximate where sources vary, and reflect widely reported timelines rather than exact start and end days.
| Role | Organisation | Roughly when |
|---|---|---|
| Consultant, rising to senior director | McKinsey & Company | ~1990s to 2012 (about 19 years) |
| Senior roles, then global chief commercial officer | PepsiCo | ~2012 to 2019 |
| Chief executive officer | Reckitt | 2019 to 2022 |
| Incoming CEO, then chief executive officer | Starbucks | Joined Oct 2022; CEO Mar 2023 to Aug 2024 |
Since leaving Starbucks he has been reported in various non-executive and board roles, but this page focuses on the coffee chapter of his career and the operating experience behind it.
Why coffee-industry leadership matters at that scale
It is easy to picture a coffee company as a place that simply makes drinks. A chain the size of Starbucks is closer to a global manufacturer, retailer and employer combined, and the person at the top is responsible for far more than what ends up in the cup. Understanding that scale is the clearest way to see what a role like this actually demands.
Supply chain and sourcing
Green coffee has to be bought from growers across many producing countries, then transported, roasted, blended, packaged and distributed to stores and shelves on a reliable schedule. Milk, syrups, cups and food items add further layers. A chief executive sets priorities for cost, quality, sustainability and resilience across that chain, so that a store on any given morning has what it needs. Small percentage changes in coffee prices or logistics ripple across thousands of outlets at once.
Stores and staff
A global chain runs tens of thousands of locations and employs a very large hourly workforce. Hiring, training, scheduling, pay, equipment and store design all sit under company leadership, and decisions in these areas shape how consistent the experience feels from one city to the next. Narasimhan's emphasis on barista training and store operations reflected how central this layer is to a cafe business, and why leaders often start by trying to understand the work behind the counter.
Customer experience and brand
Finally, there is the part customers see: the menu, seasonal drinks, mobile ordering, loyalty programs and the feel of the space. At this scale, even a modest tweak to an app or a menu affects millions of visits. Balancing all of these pressures, in dozens of markets with different tastes, is the essence of running a global cafe company, and it is a useful lens on how much sits behind a familiar logo. For the wider context of how cafe habits differ around the globe, our guide to coffee culture around the world is a good next read.
The takeaway
Laxman Narasimhan's name is tied to coffee because of a relatively short, closely watched period leading Starbucks, but his story is really about the kind of experience that lands someone in a job like that: consulting, packaged goods, and running a large consumer company through change. Whether or not his tenure is judged a success is a matter for others to debate; what it clearly illustrates is how much strategy, operations and people management sit behind a global coffee brand, and how different that is from the simple pleasure of a good cup.