President and CEO, Portillo’s Inc.
2021 compensation: $31,244,207
Osanloo, president and CEO of the Oak Brook-based restaurant chain, beefed up his total pay by 1,894.2% last year. The CEO earned $31.2 million after the company raised $405 million in its IPO last year. About 76% of Osanloo’s total compensation came from option awards.
Osanloo has faced criticism from investors over his reluctance to raise prices on menu items amid rising inflation. He’s betting that holding the line on prices will give Portillo’s an edge as consumers squeezed by inflation seek out cheaper meal options, but that attitude has sparked concern that soaring costs will mash margins.
A Chicago-area native, Osanloo came to Portillo’s from PF Chang’s in 2018.
CEO, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
2021 compensation: $23,333,498
Brewer, CEO of the Deerfield-based company and its 9,000 drugstores, took home $28.3 million in 2021.
Brewer is new to our CEOs list and is one of only two women in the top 25. She came to Walgreens with expertise in reshaping and digitizing retail chains–top priorities for the company–in March 2021. She was previously the chief operating officer of Starbucks. A Detroit native, Brewer came to Chicago when she took the helm at Walgreens.
The company is the nation’s second-largest drugstore chain with $132.5 billion in revenue. Brewer has set an unprecedented goal as the drugstore chain reinvents itself as an integrated health care company. Her target of 11 percent to 13 percent long-term growth in earnings per share is four times the company’s average pace over the past decade.
Chairman and CEO, Abbott Laboratories
2021 compensation: $24,914,886
Ford, who became CEO of Abbott in 2020, received compensation totaling $24.9 million in 2021, most of it coming from stock options and awards.
He received a $4.5 million raise last year as the medical device company saw sales surge amid rising demand for its COVID-19 BinaxNOW tests.
Ford’s base compensation was $1.48 million, up from $1.29 million in 2020. The rest of his pay was made up of more than $17 million in stock options and stock awards, about $3.16 million in cash bonuses and $2.7 million in pension earnings.
Abbott has come under fire after a whistleblower sent a complaint to the Food & Drug Administration in October 2021 alleging Abbott’s Sturgis, Mich., plant had failing equipment that needed repairs and was releasing formula without adequate evidence that it was safe for babies to consume.