Lynda Resnick is vice-chairman and co-owner of The Wonderful Company, along with her husband, Stewart Resnick, who serves as chairman. The Wonderful Company is a privately held global company committed to providing high-quality, healthy brands and helping improve the lives of the people who live and work in the communities where it operates. Its iconic brands include Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds, Wonderful Halos, Wonderful Seedless Lemons, POM Wonderful, FIJI Water, Teleflora, JUSTIN, Landmark, and Lewis Cellars wines. Headquartered in Los Angeles, The Wonderful Company has major operations in California’s Central Valley and Fiji.
Mrs. Resnick oversees worldwide marketing and product development for The Wonderful Company. She earned her nickname, “the POM Queen,” after making pomegranates and POM Wonderful—the antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice—a national sensation. She’s also known for creating unforgettable advertising campaigns and groundbreaking marketing strategies, such as “Get Crackin’” for Wonderful Pistachios and Teleflora’s “Flowers in a Gift,” which won a Gold Effie Award.
Throughout her career, as her commercial success has grown, so has her dedication to philanthropy. Through their foundation and The Wonderful Company, she and Stewart have invested more than $2.6 billion in education, health and wellness, community development, and sustainability initiatives, focused on the communities where its employees live and work. She personally guides The Wonderful Company’s innovative philanthropic endeavors, the heart of which focuses on wide-ranging efforts to enhance the lives of people in the communities where its employees live and work.
Mrs. Resnick understands that a thriving society is built on attacking the cycle of poverty by addressing the social determinants of health. Because of this, the company invests tens of millions of dollars each year into its paradigm-changing, place-based approach focused on education, health and wellness, and community building in California’s Central Valley, where the majority of its products are grown and where the majority of its workforce resides, as well as throughout the island nation of Fiji.
Wonderful’s robust education programs reach more than 117,000 students in 165 schools throughout the Central Valley. The company’s health and wellness programs provide free primary health care and medicine to 2,500 students at Wonderful College Prep Academy and 3,000 employees and their families in the Central Valley. This work has achieved notable improvements in health outcomes, including a dramatic 47% reduction in prediabetes since 2015.
For the Resnicks, the work doesn’t stop there. Their other philanthropic interests and activities are numerous. Mrs. Resnick is a dedicated patron of the arts and a longtime member of the Board of Trustees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she has been honored as a Life Trustee. She is also a Lifetime Trustee of the Aspen Institute. The Resnicks have long championed making the world safer for generations to come, and have pledged $850 million to leading universities for sustainability research and technologies that help protect the planet. In 2019, they pledged $750 million to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to further global environmental sustainability research. The Resnicks’ other philanthropic contributions include a $50 million gift to the University of California, Davis, for the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Center for Agricultural Innovation and Research Fund, and $50 million to Technion, the Institute of Technology in Israel for the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Sustainability Center for Catalysis to combat climate change.
Ranked number four on Forbes’s list of America’s Most Successful Self-Made Women and honored on the publication’s 50 Over 50 list in 2023, Mrs. Resnick is also a recipient of honorary degrees from Bard College and California State University, Fresno. As the author of the best-selling book “Rubies in the Orchard,” she shares her marketing secrets, urging people to “think inside the box,” rather than outside, and find their Unique Selling Proposition.
The Resnicks live in Beverly Hills and Aspen. They have five children and four grandchildren.