Here, everything’s about the people
Roxanne Orsak ’88 carried the values she found at Texas A&M into 38 years of leadership at H-E-B
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Ask Roxanne Orsak ’88 to describe her 38 years at H-E-B, and she does not lead with her title. She does not lead with H-E-B Plus!, the store format she helped pioneer in 2004, or Joe V’s Smart Shop, the price format she led the development of in 2010. She leads with a story about a bagger named Timmy.
Because for Orsak, leadership always comes back to people — listening to them, investing in them and making sure they know they matter.
That people-first philosophy helped guide a farm kid from Texas A&M’s agricultural economics program into the president’s office at Texas’ largest private employer.
After hearing Orsak, who became H-E-B’s president in January, share about her nearly four decades there, one might start to question if the company’s “here, everything’s better” motto could just as easily stand for “here, everything’s about the people.”
Homegrown
Ask a Texan how they feel about H-E-B, and the answer tends to verge on reverence. Ask an Aggie about the upcoming football season, and you’ll get the same thing.
Orsak is quick to tell others that, for her, the two loyalties are related because long before she led a company built around people, she was trained by one. The values she found at H-E-B, she said, are the same ones Texas A&M University and rural Texas handed her first.
Orsak grew up outside Schulenburg, a town of about 2,500 people between Houston and San Antonio. Her father raised cattle and corn and worked as a carpenter. Her mother was a nurse. Between the cattle, peach and pecan trees, and chickens, the family rarely needed a grocery store for much beyond coffee, sugar and flour, Orsak said.
Growing up, sports were a focus for Orsak until a knee injury at 13 ended that path, so she followed her three older brothers into FFA instead, raising heifers, steers and chickens, judging poultry and competing on the Chapter Conducting Team. She also joined her high school’s debate squad.
Competitions took her to different universities, including Texas A&M, for agricultural judging contests, and something about College Station stuck with her in a way others never did.
“Texas A&M always felt so much like home,” she said. “Its values felt like the ones I grew up with.”
Stocking up on the truth
She started college knowing she wanted to major in a subject agriculturally related but wasn’t quite sure where she fit in best. It took her two months and one class to find exactly where she belonged.
“Texas A&M always felt so much like home. Its values felt like the ones I grew up with.”
Roxanne Orsak ’88
H-E-B President
“I took an economics class, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” she said. “Supply and demand, and I was all in.”
Throughout her college career, she worked two jobs. On campus, she worked for James McGrann, Ph.D., an agricultural economics professor who would become her most influential mentor. On weekends, she worked for the auction business owned by the family of her then-boyfriend and now husband.
By graduation, Orsak had landed five job offers and had no idea which to take. McGrann sat down with her to build out a matrix for such an important life decision: a pro-and-con list.
But the list wasn’t what decided it.
H-E-B is Texas' largest privately held employer.
Fun fact: according to LinkedIn profiles, more than 1,600 Aggies work at H-E-B as of July 2026.
Orsak had spent four years learning that the numbers matter, yet what swayed her about H-E-B wasn’t something that could be put on an income statement.
During H-E-B’s interview process, she asked to spend time with the overnight stock crew. If you want the truth about a company, she said, talk to the people doing the work — the truck drivers, checkers and stockers.
And H-E-B’s leaders encouraged her to do exactly that. Where other companies told her about their culture from inside a boardroom, H-E-B’s senior leaders showed her through the people, or, as the company calls them, partners, who keep the whole business running.
“Just go talk to our people,” they told her, “they’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
What Orsak heard convinced her to join the company. What she learned from listening would shape how she led the company.
Partners, not paperwork
Early in her career, during store management training straight out of Texas A&M, Orsak worked in a store and met a bagger named Timmy, a young man with special needs. Bagging groceries was not easy for him, but he worked hard and always did it with a smile.
In a world where everyone is busy and wants to get out of the store quickly, Orsak noticed customers would wait in the line where Timmy was bagging. When she tried to direct them to another line, they told her it was fine — they preferred to wait for Timmy.
After training, Orsak moved to other stores and eventually became a district manager overseeing 16 stores. One of those stores was the very one where she had trained, and to her joy, Timmy was still there bagging for his loyal customers.
The service manager responsible for baggers and checkers mentioned it would be nice to give Timmy a raise. At the time, baggers only received raises by being promoted into other jobs in the store, but everyone knew bagging was Timmy’s passion and his career. So they did what they thought was right: they promoted him to maintenance partner, knowing he would remain a bagger, just so he could get a raise.
Orsak then started asking other district managers what they did for partners like Timmy, the long-term baggers, and discovered everyone was doing the same thing. Every store had a Timmy, and every store leader had quietly figured out their own way to give their partner a raise as well.
That discovery led the company to change its pay plan and create a new classification for long-term partners, one Orsak still calls the Timmy pay plan.
“He created a movement,” Orsak said — a movement of care and love for someone who worked so hard and was always so happy. Other partners picked him up or took him home from work, and customers slowed down just to spend time with him. It’s hard to put a value on that level of care. Timmy changed the entire company’s view of the bagger position.
“When I realized how much this company was willing to do to take care of all its partners, I knew this was the place for me,” Orsak said. “I was home.”
The habits behind the culture
Timmy’s story, as well as many other stories of taking care of people, helped Orsak understand why H-E-B calls its employees partners instead of staff, and why caring for people is treated not as a program but a responsibility. It is a quiet, consistent habit of noticing people and making sure they know you see them and recognize them for their contributions.
For Orsak, leadership means turning that habit into action.
It is not so different from the reason Aggies say “howdy” to strangers on the sidewalk, or why two people who have never met will spot a gold ring and immediately start swapping class years. Some places just build that into who they are.
“Each and every person counts,” Orsak said. “We don’t do it for notoriety. We do it because we care — because people matter.”
