Jeffrey Sanfilippo and the things worth keeping

The perfume may be long gone. Jeffrey Sanfilippo would still like you to look at the bottle. Its glass, its lettering, the small flourish somebody once considered essential: these are reasons to keep paying attention after the original transaction is over. A disposable object can have a surprisingly long second act, provided somebody is willing to give it shelf space.

Sanfilippo has given such objects considerably more than a shelf. With Rusty Hernandez-Sanfilippo, he co-founded Perfume Passage Foundation, dedicated to preserving perfume bottles, compacts, related artifacts and their histories. In October 2026, the project reached Milan through a collaboration with photographer and collector Guido Taroni. For an executive associated with cashews and pecans, it is an enjoyably unexpected destination.

At John B. Sanfilippo & Son, the questions have been more practical: what to make, how to sell it, where to invest, whom to trust with the next responsibility. He became CEO in November 2006 and executive chairman on October 1, 2026. Between those dates, a fourth-generation family executive helped carry a nut processor into a wider snack business. Outside the office, he helped make a home for things other people might have thrown away.

The bottle after the perfume

There is a temptation to treat collecting as the amusing footnote to a serious career. In Sanfilippo’s case, it deserves a larger paragraph. Perfume Passage concerns itself with documentation as well as objects. Its stated purpose includes education and archival resources. A bottle without a history is attractive glass. Put it beside an advertisement, a maker’s record or a related design, and a piece of commercial life comes back into view.

His interests include Lalique glass, Robj perfume lamps, men’s fragrances and Italian perfume history. That range takes in sculpture, packaging and the apparatus of selling an experience. These objects once had jobs to do. They had to catch someone’s eye, convey an idea and make a purchase feel worthwhile. The display case arrives later.

The link to a consumer-products career is suggestive, though the two pursuits need no grand theory to justify them. Anybody who has stood in a supermarket aisle knows that a package must say quite a lot without being given much time. A collector, by contrast, can spend an afternoon on the details. Sanfilippo’s working life accommodates both speeds.

A detour with a film credit

His route into the business included a deliberate interval elsewhere. After studying international relations and economics at the University of Southern California, he spent five years in film production. He has a producer credit on The Boneyard, released in 1991. Few executive biographies offer that particular opening conversation.

“I wanted to explore another business, learn some lessons, become a better leader,” he later recalled. The family business would eventually bring him back, but experience beyond it was part of the route. The detour matters because succession stories can make a career appear settled before its owner has done any settling.

“It has been a privilege to serve as CEO.”

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, July 2026

The company’s record places his arrival in September 1991 as general manager of West Coast operations. Responsibility was geographic and concrete. In 1993, sales joined the title. By 1995, he was vice president of sales and marketing. Those early assignments put customers and operations in the same career, before the boardroom became the setting.

He joined the board in 1999, advanced through the senior sales and marketing positions, and became CEO on November 6, 2006. He was elected chairman in 2008. His MBA followed in 2009, completed while working full time. The sequence gives the educational credential some context: this was study alongside a demanding job, with plenty of opportunity for the day’s business to complicate the evening’s theory.

The family name, the customer’s label

The family story begins in Chicago in 1922 with Gaspare Sanfilippo and his son John shelling pecans. Over the following generations, machinery, facilities and acquisitions changed the scale of the operation. Jeffrey inherited a company with an established industrial history, rather than an empty desk and an inspirational founding anecdote.

It also had two kinds of public identity. Shoppers might recognize Fisher, Orchard Valley Harvest or Squirrel Brand. Other products reached them under a retailer’s private label. The manufacturer could be present in the shopping basket while remaining absent from its most visible name. For a business bearing the family surname, that is a useful lesson in sharing the spotlight.

The commercial work sits behind the label: securing ingredients, processing them, developing products, meeting a retailer’s requirements and getting the finished goods where they belong. Sanfilippo’s years in sales and marketing made that customer-facing side of the company a substantial part of his preparation. A familiar brand and an unfamiliar supplier can depend on the same factory getting its work right.

On March 14, 2022, he rang Nasdaq’s closing bell for the company’s hundredth anniversary. The ceremony gathered a century into a few minutes in Times Square. The photograph supplies something the corporate name cannot: people standing close together, applauding a business that began long before most of them were born.

A different kind of bar business

A centenary can encourage a company to admire its old products. During Sanfilippo’s tenure, JBSS also pursued new ones. In September 2023, it completed the purchase of snack bar assets from TreeHouse Foods for approximately $61.3 million in cash. The transaction included inventory, customer relationships and a manufacturing facility in Lakeville, Minnesota.

Approximately 400 employees came with the operation. That detail makes the acquisition more tangible than the price alone. A product category arrives with equipment, routines, people and customers. Its place in a strategy presentation may be tidy; integrating it into a working company requires a good deal more attention.

The planned range included fruit and grain, crunchy, sweet and salty, chewy, and protein bars. It broadened what JBSS could offer private label customers. A retailer buying one category could now discuss another with the same supplier. For an executive trained in sales, there is a recognizable commercial logic in making that conversation longer.

Fiscal 2024 brought the company’s first year above $1 billion in net sales. Snack and nutrition bars accounted for about $131 million, including $120 million related to the Lakeville acquisition. The milestone reflected a changed product portfolio as well as a larger headline number.

The latest completed fiscal year offers a more textured picture. In fiscal 2026, annual sales increased 6.2%, while pounds sold declined 2.5%. Fourth-quarter sales volume returned to growth, but quarterly profitability weakened. Sanfilippo identified higher input and transport costs and manufacturing inefficiencies among the pressures.

Those results belong in the same account as the milestones. More dollars through a business do not settle every question about how it is running. An executive responsible for a food manufacturer must keep looking beyond the attractive number, toward the less photogenic details that determine whether the next order goes smoothly.

An audience in Venice, a doorway in Milan

On October 8, 2023, Sanfilippo appeared in a rather different professional gathering: the opening meeting of the International Perfume Bottle Association’s Italia, Portugal and España chapter, at Venice’s Museo Correr. He presented selections from his collection alongside collectors sharing objects and research from several countries.

The program makes the collecting interest wonderfully specific. One listed object was a Chicago-made, coin-operated perfume-spraying machine from around 1905. Its materials included wood, metal, glass and rubber. A customer paid for a spritz dispensed by a decorative figure. Apparently, convenience retail had theatrical ambitions well before the touchscreen.

The association has also jointly honored him and Rusty for their contributions. Collecting here involves a community as well as possessions: presentations, research, gatherings and the patient effort of keeping knowledge attached to objects. The cabinet is only part of the undertaking.

Milan extends that work. The new Perfume Passage space, reported open in October 2026, occupies a renovated 1920s building and focuses on Italian perfume history. Jeffrey and Rusty’s collaboration with Taroni places bottles, documents and design within the country whose commercial and artistic history they help tell. The project gives a collecting interest an address where other people can encounter it.

The next person at the desk

At the company, October brought another change. Jasper B. Sanfilippo Jr., Jeffrey’s brother and the longtime president and chief operating officer, became CEO. Frank Pellegrino became president and retained the CFO role. Jeffrey became executive chairman, continuing to lead the board and support strategy and long-term growth.

The transition moves him into a different relationship with a business he has worked in for thirty-five years. Supporting a successor has its own responsibilities. The announcement described a deliberate succession process; the new division of work gives continuity an organizational form.

His interests still point outward. As a high-school exchange student, he went to Cali, Colombia, an experience he has credited with shaping his appreciation of other cultures. Decades later, the geography of his life includes a company in Elgin, a home in Barrington Hills, a presentation in Venice and a museum project in Milan.

There is room in that itinerary for an old business to develop new products, and for an empty bottle to acquire new meaning. Sanfilippo has spent years deciding what to carry forward. Now the CEO’s desk belongs to his brother. The collection keeps offering reasons to look again.