New Greene King CEO Clair Preston-Beer Makes History as First Woman to Lead 227-Year-Old Pub Giant

Greene King will have a new CEO from March 2027, and for the first time in the company’s 227-year history it will be a woman. Clair Preston-Beer, currently chief digital and commercial officer, is to succeed Nick Mackenzie, who steps down at the end of February after nearly eight years running Britain’s second-largest pub chain.

Who is the next Greene King CEO?

Ms Preston-Beer is an internal appointment. She joined Greene King in 2020 as managing director of pubs, and she later moved into the digital and commercial role she holds now. Before that she was a senior executive at Whitbread, where she helped expand the Costa Coffee brand in the UK and abroad ahead of its sale to The Coca-Cola Company in 2019.

Mr Mackenzie called leading the business “the privilege of my career” and described his successor as “exceptionally qualified”. He said he had worked closely with her for the past six years. He will stay on the board through next year to help with the handover.

A business in the middle of a reshaping

The new Greene King CEO takes over a company that is part-way through a significant overhaul. Mr Mackenzie led it through its 2019 takeover by Hong Kong conglomerate CK Assets and has since been remodelling both the pub estate and the brewing side.

In March the company said it would move about 300 managed pubs into a separate business division, with roughly half of them earmarked for sale. In May it agreed to sell Old Speckled Hen to the owner of Estrella Damm. That deal is part of a move away from brewing beer for retailers and supermarkets. In the long term it will mean closing the Westgate Brewery in Bury St Edmunds, although a new facility is being built in the town.

The group employs around 38,000 people and operates about 2,500 pubs, restaurants and hotels, so the changes are large in scale.

Technology at the centre of the pitch

Ms Preston-Beer’s first comments suggest continuity rather than a change of course. She described an “ambitious strategy in place that is focused on growing share in a challenging environment”. She said technology would be central to it, adding that the company has “prioritised investment in data and AI to ensure that every pub is easier for our teams to run, every customer experience more personal and every decision better informed”.

That emphasis fits her background. Her current brief combines digital and commercial responsibilities, and the strategy she describes leans on both. The sources do not give financial details of the investment or say how AI will be used in pubs, so it is unclear how far the plans have progressed.

The announcement also stresses a smooth transition. Mr Mackenzie is staying on the board, and the two have a long working relationship. For a company still disposing of pubs and restructuring its brewing operations, that continuity may matter as much as the historic first. The next Greene King CEO will be judged on whether the pub sale programme, the brewery shift and the technology investment deliver in what the company itself calls a challenging environment.

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File photo: Greene King Brewery – geograph.org.uk – 7537445.jpg by Sandy Gerrard, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.