The Consulting Report is pleased to announce The Top Consumer and Retail Consultants and Leaders of 2026. Consumer and retail companies are deeply embedded in daily life and in the broader economy, making them one of the clearest indicators of how people spend, what they value, and how markets are shifting. That also creates constant pressure to adjust. As new technologies evolve alongside consumer behavior, companies are being pushed to keep pace across both digital and physical channels. These leaders help them do exactly that.

This year’s awardees are experts in consumer behavior and in helping companies act on what those shifts actually mean. Their work covers areas like growth strategy, pricing, merchandising, customer experience, communications, M&A, and digital transformation, often for some of the most recognizable businesses in consumer and retail. In doing so, they play a direct role in helping those companies boost customer satisfaction and stay operationally nimble as expectations change and competition intensifies.

Among this year’s awardees, Alison Furman, Partner at PwC, stands out for leading the firm’s U.S. Consumer Markets practice while bringing deep experience in transformation and M&A across retail, consumer packaged goods, travel, hospitality, airlines, and restaurants. Rachel Rosenblatt, Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting, is recognized for advising retail and consumer companies on reputation and crisis communications, particularly during periods of change that can include IPOs, litigation, restructurings, and other high-stakes moments. Morgan Seybert, President of Retail and CPG at Tredence, is noted for advising FMCG retailers and manufacturers on retail analytics, pricing, and revenue management, drawing on prior leadership roles at Nielsen, Coca-Cola, and Kantar Retail.

This year’s awardees were selected through a methodical process and careful consideration of each candidate’s career track record and industry contributions. Please join us in celebrating The Top Consumer and Retail Consultants and Leaders of 2026.

Alison Furman
Firm: PwC
Title: Partner

Alison Furman is PwC’s U.S. Consumer Markets Industry Leader across PwC’s three lines of service: advisory, assurance, and tax. Her portfolio includes PwC’s retail, hospitality, consumer packaged goods, travel, airlines, and restaurant sub-sectors. Leveraging her extensive industry experience and the PwC network, she works closely with senior leaders to grow, transform, and take advantage of disruption across consumer markets.

Alison is a nationally recognized thought leader and speaker on consumer markets industry trends and insights, helping clients prepare for the future. She is regularly featured in broadcast and print media and is an active sponsor of the Consumer Brands Association and the National Retail Federation. She also serves on the NRF Foundation Board. Within PwC, Alison has held various leadership roles, including managing partner of the U.S. Transformation Consulting business, where she was responsible for growing management and strategy consulting across 11 commercial industry sectors and managing a $4 billion P&L. 

Alison is also an M&A partner with over 20 years of combined industry and transaction consulting experience. She has supported hundreds of M&A transactions, including many of the largest consumer markets mega-deals valued at more than $5 billion. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and film and media studies from Swarthmore College as well as an MBA from Penn State University.

Carla DeSantis
Firm: PwC
Title: Partner

Carla DeSantis is a Partner in PwC’s Consumer Markets practice. With almost 30 years of experience in multiple sectors, in industry and as a consultant, Carla designs and implements differentiated operating models that drive sustainable growth while optimizing costs. She has expertise in such areas as innovation, sales, customer experience, supply chain, operating model design, and sustainability, having executed global and local engagements. ​

Carla serves as the firm's CPG leader within the Consumer Markets industry practice, driving solutions, campaigns, and account activity across the CPG industry sector. In addition to being an active partner on the Consumer Markets team, Carla currently serves as the Global Point Partner for two of the highest priority accounts for the firm and was the former consulting lead for the largest consumer products client at the firm. ​

Carla also serves as the Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer for PwC’s Operations Transformation practice, working closely with the Operations Transformation leader to optimize the practice’s go-to-market strategy.​ She is also a member of PwC’s America in Motion team, where she provides insight into the strategic and operational implications of policy and regulatory change.​ She holds a bachelor’s degree in government and economics from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Kelly Pedersen
Firm: PwC
Title: Partner

Kelly Pedersen is a Partner at PwC and leads the firm’s Global and U.S. Retail practice. Based in San Francisco, he brings more than 20 years of experience across retail, including roles in industry and consulting.

Kelly has advised retailers on a wide array of topics that range from growth and profit strategies, large business transformations, and technology and capability building. He focuses a significant amount of time in the merchandising area, helping retailers organize and optimize for growth in an omni-channel environment through their product, pricing and promotion, and inventory strategies.

Prior to joining PwC, Kelly was an executive at a large global apparel retailer and also previously worked for a large grocery retailer. Earlier in his career at PwC, he worked with apparel and retail companies on strategic initiatives related to growth and operational effectiveness. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Calgary.

Rachel Rosenblatt
Firm: FTI Consulting
Title: Senior Managing Director

Rachel Rosenblatt is a Senior Managing Director in the Strategic Communications segment of FTI Consulting and Head of the Americas Retail & Consumer Products sector. She specializes in reputation management, crisis communications, corporate positioning and communications training, and has more than 20 years of experience advising clients on strategic communications, media relations, media training, presentation coaching, crisis management, corporate communications, and public relations.

Rachel works with some of the world’s most recognizable companies in the retail and consumer space to help them tell their stories more effectively, often in times of crisis or transformation. She has specific expertise in developing and executing multidisciplinary communications campaigns to impact multiple stakeholder groups in a meaningful way. Additionally, she works with companies through all phases of their life cycle, from IPOs to building and molding reputation, managing moments of crisis or change, and supporting through litigation, bankruptcies, or restructurings.

Rachel is also a founding member of the firm’s Communications Training team and has designed and implemented media, presentation, and investor relations training programs for multinational companies that have been executed around the world. As one of the firm’s senior trainers, she regularly coaches top executives in advance of media interviews, investor and analyst meetings, IPOs, and major presentations. 

Prior to joining FTI Consulting in 2005, Rachel was a director at Westhill Partners, a boutique consulting firm specializing in communications strategy. She is a member of the Belizean Grove, a preeminent global network of influential women committed to building collaborative, trusted partnerships, and is an active member of the Lenox Hill Hospital Auxiliary and chair of its communications committee. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. 

Morgan Seybert
Firm: Tredence
Title: President, Retail & CPG

Morgan Seybert is President of Retail and CPG at Tredence. Over the course of his career, he has served as a trusted advisor to 65% of the Fortune 500 FMCG retailers and manufacturers and delivered more than $500 million in realized client profit growth. He previously served as the managing director for Nielsen’s Analytics practice area, where he built merchandising solutions used by retailers representing over $600 billion of retail sales.

Morgan also held executive roles leading revenue management strategy and national category management for Coca-Cola and at Kantar Retail, leading their Price Optimization practice area. Under his leadership, Tredence has become the preferred data and AI transformation partner for eight of the world’s top ten retailers—including major grocery chains—collectively generating more than $1 trillion in annual sales.

Since 2021, Morgan has driven a five‑fold increase in the retail business and built a high‑performing global team of more than 1,200 retail consultants. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Williams College.

Rakesh Mani
Firm: PwC
Title: Partner

Rakesh Mani is a Partner at PwC and leads the firm's Consumer Markets practice across Asia Pacific, advising leading retailers, consumer goods companies, and diversified conglomerates on growth strategy, commercial excellence, and large-scale cost transformation. 

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Rakesh brings a career spanning PwC's United States, Japan, and Southeast Asia practices—a breadth of markets that informs his work across the region's diverse and fast-evolving consumer landscape. His client base spans corporate leaders and global private equity, and he has advised governments on policy design and program execution for topics related to agriculture and food security. 

Rakesh is a regular contributor to regional thought leadership and is an occasional speaker at industry executive forums such as the National Retail Federation (NRF) and the Retail Asia summit. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science and mathematics from New York University.

Sudip Mazumder
Firm: Publicis Sapient
Title: SVP, Retail Industry Lead

Sudip Mazumder is Senior Vice President and Retail and B2B Industry Lead at Publicis Sapient. He is a trusted business partner who advises clients on growth and go-to-market strategies, consumer experience, and commercial effectiveness programs in the AI-led digital business transformation space.

For over two decades, Sudip has delivered several large digital business transformation engagements for multiple Fortune 500 clients, helping them unlock significant revenue growth and operational cost savings. His work has centered on identifying customer and enterprise value and helping clients unlock that value by employing agility-at-scale techniques to rapidly deploy exceptional experiences, world-class engineered solutions, and autonomous AI-driven processes.

Previously, Sudip led Publicis Sapient’s integrated delivery organization in North America, working at the intersection of technology, data, and creativity to help C-suite clients realize the promise of digital by delivering positive business outcomes. He has also received several awards during his career at the firm for leadership, delivery, and technology. Sudip holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and an MBA in general management from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Samir Chopra
Firm: HCLTech
Title: Vice President

Samir Chopra is Vice President and part of the leadership team in HCLTech’s Retail and CPG vertical. In this role, he manages key named and strategic global accounts across infrastructure, applications, digital, and engineering services. His responsibilities include customer advocacy, account leadership, relationship management with CIOs, CTOs, CXOs, and other key executives, as well as account P&L, sales growth, and delivery.

Samir brings nearly two decades of diverse global experience across sales, pre-sales, techno-commercial management, program management, and consulting. He leads a portfolio of retail and CPG global accounts with direct responsibility for revenue retention and upsell, and his work spans pre-sales, post-sales, program management, and service delivery. He has substantial experience managing IT services for global customers in the retail and CPG, aviation, high tech, public services, and manufacturing sectors across multiple service lines.

Over the course of his career at HCLTech, Samir has advanced through a series of leadership roles spanning account management, program management, sales, and vertical leadership. He holds an MBA in marketing from ICFAI Business School and a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Maharashtra Academy of Engineering at Pune University.

Charisma Glassman
Firm: Genpact
Title: Partner, Vice President, Global Head of Retail, Consumer & E-Commerce Applied Advisory 

Charisma Glassman is Vice President, Partner, and Global Head of Retail, Consumer & E-Commerce Applied Advisory at Genpact. A trusted advisor to C-suite leaders, she has helped shape the future of global brands across consumer, retail, luxury, hospitality, and financial services industries. With deep experience across North American, European, and Asian markets, she has led transformative initiatives that deliver measurable impact in revenue growth, customer experience, and operational excellence.

Before joining Genpact, Charisma served as the portfolio head of consumer, luxury, and retail at Capgemini and as global head of customer technology at Barclays Bank, where she led the institution through a major transformation during a period of crisis. Her strategy-driven initiatives achieved more than £100 million in savings and strengthened Barclays’ long-term competitive position. 

Across her over two-decade career, Charisma has delivered large-scale business, AI, and technology transformations delivering both top line and bottom line impact. She has successfully managed multibillion-dollar P&Ls and globally distributed teams, aligning innovation with business strategy to drive sustainable growth for Fortune 100 clients.

A respected thought leader, Charisma is a TEDx speaker and has delivered keynote speeches at industry events, sharing insights on innovation, omnichannel experiences, and leadership. Her work and perspectives have been featured in a range of publications. Charisma holds an executive general management credential from Harvard Business School, a master’s degree in technology management from New York University, and is pursuing an executive MBA at Columbia Business School, specializing in finance and strategy.

Shikha Jain
Firm: Simon-Kucher
Title: Partner

Shikha Jain is a Partner in the Consumer & Retail practice at Simon-Kucher, a global commercial growth and pricing specialist with over 2,200 experts across 30+ countries and more than 40 years of experience.  

Based in the Boston office, Jain is a recognized expert in consumer, retail, and travel/leisure/tourism strategy in North America. As the lead Partner for the Consumer & Retail sector in North America at Simon-Kucher, she advises some of the world’s most recognizable brands through complex market challenges. Her expertise lies in creating high-impact go-to-market strategies that lead to commercial excellence across all revenue growth topics.

Over the past decade at Simon-Kucher, Jain has built strong expertise in North American markets while bringing a global perspective through work across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. She is known for translating complexity into clear, actionable strategies that deliver measurable revenue and margin impact and strengthen clients’ competitive positioning. Prior to consulting, she worked in M&A and capital markets at a global investment bank.

Beyond her advisory work, Jain is a strong advocate for culture and belonging in the workplace. She actively contributes to advancing inclusive practices and explores the role of sustainability as a key driver of future business growth. She is a sought-after speaker and authority on a range of topics, including tariffs, inflation, consumer behavior, pricing strategy, revenue management, commercial strategy, pricing consultation, and the future of retail.

Jain holds an MBA in Strategy and Marketing from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Smith College.