Altria Group has elected Steve Presley to its board of directors, the Richmond, Virginia based nicotine products company announced on August 28, 2026. Presley joined the board on August 27, 2026, according to the company's announcement, which was filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to a current report.
Altria said Presley will serve as a member of the board's Compensation and Talent Development Committee, its Innovation Committee and its Finance Committee. The company presented the appointment as an addition to the board and did not identify any director leaving in connection with it, so the change is an orderly expansion of the existing board rather than a replacement.
Presley is chief executive officer of Refresco, a global independent beverage solutions provider, a position he has held since August 2025.
Before that he spent his career at Nestle. He served as executive vice president and chief executive officer, Zone Americas, from October 2024 to April 2025, and as executive vice president and chief executive officer, Zone North America, from January 2021 to October 2024. He joined Nestle USA in 1997 and held a variety of other senior roles there, including chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chief transformation officer.
The appointment therefore brings to the board an executive whose record is in packaged goods and beverages rather than in tobacco, and who has held both general management and finance titles inside a large consumer group.
Altria Group is the parent of a portfolio of nicotine businesses serving United States consumers aged 21 and over. Its wholly owned subsidiaries include Philip Morris USA, which the company describes as the most profitable United States cigarette manufacturer, John Middleton, a cigar manufacturer, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, a moist smokeless tobacco manufacturer, Helix Innovations, a manufacturer of oral nicotine pouches, and NJOY, an e-vapor manufacturer with products covered by marketing granted orders from the United States Food and Drug Administration.
The company also holds a majority owned joint venture, Horizon Innovations, for the United States marketing and commercialisation of heated tobacco stick products, and equity investments in the brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev and in the Canadian cannabinoid company Cronos Group. Its operating companies' brands include Marlboro, Black and Mild, Copenhagen, Skoal, on! and NJOY.
Altria describes its strategy as moving beyond smoking, transitioning adult smokers to smoke free products, competing for existing smoke free adult nicotine consumers and exploring growth opportunities outside the United States and outside nicotine. That programme depends on new product categories, on regulatory clearances from the Food and Drug Administration and on active portfolio management, and the wider nicotine sector has been recruiting directors with consumer goods and innovation records as those categories have grown.
The committee assignments indicate where the board expects Presley to work. Seats on the compensation, innovation and finance committees place him in executive pay decisions, in the oversight of new product development and in financial policy at once. For a company whose growth case rests on shifting consumer demand from combustible products toward smoke free ones, the addition of a serving beverage chief executive with nearly three decades of packaged goods experience indicates the type of commercial and operating judgment the board is seeking as it manages that transition.
