Rick Cohen

Rick Cohen is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Symbotic, a robotics and automation company focused on reimagining the traditional consumer goods supply chain. Rick is also the Executive Chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc. (C&S), an industry leader in supply chain solutions and wholesale grocery supply in the United States with responsibility for supplying more than 7,700 customers nationwide. Rick grew up around C&S’s grocery distribution business, which was started by his family in 1918. In 1981, Rick became the CEO of C&S and grew the company from $100 million in sales, to more than $20 billion today, placing C&S among the 10 largest privately-owned companies in the U.S. While living the challenges of grocery distribution, Rick invested in many of the leading supply chain automation technologies of the day. Frustrated with solutions that simply automated historically manual processes, Rick began to nurture innovation focused on fundamentally rethinking the supply chain. Grocery partners visiting C&S operations began to ask Rick for his solutions, and thus Symbotic was born. Symbotic’s unique platform, with more than 250 issued patents, is an end-to-end system that reimagines every aspect of the warehouse and is fueled by a unique combination of proprietary software and a fleet of fully autonomous robots. Symbotic is rapidly growing with a pipeline to build its transformative systems for Fortune 100 retailers and wholesalers throughout the United States and Canada. In December 2021, Symbotic announced plans to go public through a merger with a SPAC sponsored by SoftBank in order to accelerate its push into warehouse automation. Rick holds a bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the Wharton School of Business. He has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Assumption College and Keene State College. In his personal time, Rick is dedicated to working within the community to drive change. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire and over the past three decades, he has served on the boards of various civic organizations.