In September 2005, Selena Cuffe was in South Africa on an unrelated business trip when she walked into the first annual Soweto Wine Festival. She left with the seed of what would become Heritage Link Brands — the largest global importer of Black-produced wine, operating in the U.S...but there's more
Today's Builders · The Black Executive Journal™ Culver City, CA / Los Angeles, CA · Wine Import, Food Services & Institutional Growth · Heritage Link Brands · Founded 2005
— Born November 5, 1975 in Culver City, California; raised in the View Park-Windsor Hills community of Los Angeles County by her mother; her father died one month before her second birthday; her paternal great-grandfather was born into slavery, descended from the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at age eight; both of her paternal grandparents graduated from college in the 1920s — her grandfather Titus Saunders Sr. was a desegregrationist who founded Georgia's first integrated school transportation system
— Received a 1993 Glamour Magazine College Woman of the Year award — a list whose alumni include Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, Martha Stewart, and Diane Sawyer; graduated with an AB in International Relations from Stanford University; completed the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) program, interning for an investment bank on Wall Street; earned an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School; certified with merit by the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust
— Early career at United Airlines, where she worked on territorial sales, new route promotion, and digital business development including the launch of Hotwire and Orbitz; moved to Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as Assistant Brand Manager for the Pringles brand, managing marketing plans for Brazil and Mexico; left P&G to serve as Director at the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), overseeing work and student exchanges for more than 50,000 people worldwide
— Founded Heritage Link Brands in October 2005 — financed through personal savings and credit cards while still employed full-time at CIEE; left CIEE in January 2007 to run the company full-time; launched wines in a Whole Foods Market test market in February 2007; within two years was featured in TIME magazine
— Heritage Link Brands grew to operate in more than 40 U.S. states; by the time of Cuffe's appointment to SodexoMAGIC in 2020, the company had sold more than 70 million liters; its portfolio includes wines from South Africa, Brazil, France, and Fair Trade certified producers; Heritage Link's One World label — produced by the Fair Trade certified Koopmanskloof community — holds the distinction of being the first Fair Trade certified wine served on any U.S. airline
— In 2015, began importing French wine to produce the house red and white for Waitress — Broadway's first production with an all-female creative team; Heritage Link Brands also produced house wine for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and War Paint on Broadway; negotiated exclusive U.S. import rights for Brazilian producer Casa Valduga — home to the largest sparkling wine cellar in South America — in 2016
— In South Africa, negotiated interest acquisition of Silkbush Mountain Vineyards in partnership with Burdell Properties — a 138-hectare property in Breedekloof, 90 km east of Cape Town, planted with 14 cultivars on hillsides up to 700 meters above sea level
— Named President of SodexoMAGIC in March 2020 — the joint venture between Magic Johnson Enterprises (51% ownership) and Sodexo, overseeing a portfolio of 1,700 U.S. client sites and 6,500 employees across airlines, universities, corporations, and health systems
— Named Chief Growth Officer of Blackstone Consulting, Inc. in April 2023 — an $800 million, 9,000-person international services provider and NMSDC Corporate Plus member whose client base includes the U.S. Department of Defense and Fortune 500 companies; also serves as Chief Growth Officer of RJB Properties, Inc.
— Appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Los Angeles Branch Board of Directors in January 2024; life member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2016; advisor to Stanford University's Bing Overseas Studies Program; Vice President Emeritus of the Harvard Business School Alumni Board; chair of the Nominating & Governance Committee of the Harvard Business School Women's Student Association Alumnae Advisory Board
— Named Black Enterprise "B.E. Next Entrepreneur of the Year" in 2009; Vision in Wine Award from BCAGlobal in 2016; Women Trailblazers Award from the Brooklyn Library in 2019; UCLA Riordan Programs Hall of Fame inductee in 2022
Before Heritage Link Brands, before Harvard, before Stanford, before any of it, there is a fact about Selena Cuffe's family that contextualizes everything she built.
Her paternal great-grandfather was born into slavery — a descendant of the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation when he was eight years old.
He had sixteen children.
The youngest of those children was Titus Saunders Sr., Cuffe's grandfather, who graduated from college in the 1920s and became a desegrationionist — founding Georgia's first integrated school transportation system.
Both of her paternal grandparents held college degrees in an era when that was an extraordinary accomplishment for Black Americans.
Cuffe's father died when she was one month old.
She was raised by her mother in View Park-Windsor Hills, a historically Black upper-middle-class community in Los Angeles County.
She grew up inside a family story that was explicitly about the conversion of oppression into institution — about people who had been denied everything using education, enterprise, and civic commitment to build something lasting.
That family story was not abstract background.
It was the operating framework for a career that would eventually bring her back to Africa as a businesswoman — not as a tourist, not as a charity worker, but as a market participant who saw economic inequality and decided to make the correction through commerce.
Cuffe's credentials are not incidental to her story. They are the mechanism by which she gained access to the rooms where her instincts could be acted upon at scale.
She graduated from Stanford with a degree in International Relations.
While there she completed the SEO program and interned on Wall Street — an early exposure to how capital markets operated and how institutional money moved. She went on to United Airlines, where she worked on digital distribution and helped launch both Hotwire and Orbitz at a moment when the digitization of travel was itself a structural transformation.
She moved to Procter & Gamble, where she served as Assistant Brand Manager for Pringles, managing marketing for Brazil and Mexico — her first sustained operational experience with Latin American markets, a relationship that would resurface later in her wine import business.
Then Harvard Business School, with honors, where she absorbed the case method approach to business problems — the habit of looking at a situation, identifying the structural dynamics, and asking what a smart actor with appropriate resources would do.
She graduated in 1993 and continued building her pre-entrepreneurship career, eventually landing as Director at the Council on International Educational Exchange, overseeing student and work exchanges for more than 50,000 people worldwide.
She was thirty years old.
She had an Ivy League MBA, brand management experience at a global consumer goods company, digital business experience at a major airline, and a directorship at an international exchange organization.
She was, by any conventional measure, a highly successful professional.
Then she walked into the Soweto Wine Festival.
The first annual Soweto Wine Festival was organized by the Cape Wine Academy and held in Johannesburg in September 2005. Cuffe was in South Africa on an unrelated business trip. She decided to attend.
At the festival she met the women behind Seven Sisters Winery — one of the only Black-owned wineries in South Africa.
They were having difficulty exporting to the United States and finding distributors in their domestic market. Cuffe looked at the broader numbers at the festival: South Africa's wine industry was valued at $3 billion. Less than two percent of that industry was owned by Black South Africans, who made up more than 80 percent of the country's population.
She had spent years studying market structures.
She recognized what she was looking at: a distribution problem masquerading as a structural inequality. The wine existed. The quality was there. The market — both in South Africa and internationally — had simply not been connected to the producers.
The producers, as Black-owned businesses in a post-apartheid economy still structured by the asymmetries of the previous century, lacked the market access and export infrastructure to build those connections themselves.
Heritage Link Brands was founded in October 2005. Cuffe financed it through personal savings and credit cards.
She stayed at CIEE — she needed the income — while building the company in whatever margin she could find. In 2006 she brought M'hudi into the portfolio: the first Black-owned family vineyard in South Africa post-apartheid.
In January 2007 she left CIEE to run Heritage Link Brands full-time. In February 2007 — one month after leaving her job — the wines launched in a Whole Foods Market test market.
Two years after her first visit to the Soweto Wine Festival, TIME magazine featured her and her company. The story's framing was about African Americans finding heritage in South African wines.
That was true.
It was also a story about a Harvard MBA identifying a market failure and building the infrastructure to correct it.
Heritage Link Brands grew because Cuffe understood both sides of the market simultaneously — the producers who needed access and the buyers who were looking for differentiated product with a credible story.
The One World label, produced by the Fair Trade certified Koopmanskloof community in South Africa, became the first Fair Trade certified wine served on any U.S. airline.
The distinction mattered for institutional buyers with sustainability commitments — airlines, hotels, corporate accounts — who could include the product in their procurement on both quality and supply chain integrity grounds.
In 2015, Cuffe moved into the prestige hospitality market. She began importing French wine to produce the house red and white for Waitress on Broadway — the first Broadway production with an all-female creative team, a distinction that was itself a market story.
The pairing was not accidental.
A company built on the narrative of representation and access supplied the wine for a production making history on exactly those terms. Heritage Link Brands subsequently produced house wine for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and War Paint on Broadway.
In 2016 she negotiated exclusive U.S. import rights for Casa Valduga, the Brazilian producer whose facility houses the largest sparkling wine cellar in South America.
The same year, in South Africa, she negotiated the interest acquisition of Silkbush Mountain Vineyards — 138 hectares in Breedekloof, 90 km east of Cape Town, planted with 14 cultivars on hillsides up to 700 meters in elevation.
The vertical integration from import business to vineyard ownership represented a structural deepening of Heritage Link's position in the South African wine market.
By the time Cuffe stepped into her next chapter at SodexoMAGIC in 2020, Heritage Link Brands had sold more than 70 million liters.
In March 2020, Magic Johnson Enterprises and Sodexo named Cuffe President of SodexoMAGIC — the joint venture in which Magic Johnson Enterprises holds 51% ownership, qualifying it as a NMSDC-certified Minority Owned Business.
The portfolio comprised 1,700 U.S. client sites across airlines, universities, corporations, and health systems, with 6,500 employees.
Earvin Johnson was direct about the rationale for the selection:
"The business expertise of Selena is unique. As a successful entrepreneur, she will bring a diligent mindset with a vision to think differently and ultimately, propel our organization forward."
In April 2023 she became Chief Growth Officer of Blackstone Consulting, Inc. — an $800 million, 9,000-person international services provider whose clients include the U.S. Department of Defense, Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities, and military installations.
She simultaneously holds the Chief Growth Officer role at RJB Properties, Inc., a facilities management company serving K-12 schools, higher education campuses, commercial office spaces, convention centers, and military installations.
The scale shift from Heritage Link Brands to these institutional platforms is significant.
The wine company was built to create market access for Black producers in a $3 billion industry.
The institutional roles she now holds operate within ecosystems worth multiples of that. The strategic DNA is consistent: identify the structural gap between where resources are and where they need to go, and build the function that closes it.
In January 2024, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco appointed Cuffe to its Los Angeles Branch Board of Directors.
The appointment was confirmed by the Fed's own press release, which listed her title as Co-Founder of Heritage Link Brands and Chief Growth Officer of Blackstone Consulting, Inc.
The Los Angeles Branch Board advises the Federal Reserve on economic conditions in the region and provides input into monetary policy and Bank operations.
The appointment placed Cuffe inside one of the most consequential economic governance structures in the country — at a table where the health of the regional economy, access to credit, and the functioning of the financial system are discussed and influenced.
She is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a governance role whose significance is frequently understated — membership represents ongoing inclusion in the most consequential conversations about American foreign policy and global economics.
She serves as Vice President Emeritus of the Harvard Business School Alumni Board, chairs the Nominating & Governance Committee of the HBS Women's Student Association Alumnae Advisory Board, and advises Stanford's Bing Overseas Studies Program.
The arc from the Soweto Wine Festival to the Federal Reserve Board is not a detour.
It is a straight line: she saw an economic inequality, built a business to address it, proved the model, scaled the methodology, and earned institutional trust across two decades until the institutions themselves asked her to help govern them.
What Selena Cuffe built is not a wine company, though Heritage Link Brands is real and its 70 million liters are documented.
What she built is a methodology for finding markets that structural inequality has distorted — where the supply exists, the demand exists, and the connection between them has been severed by historical exclusion — and restoring the circuit.
She has applied that methodology to South African wine, to Broadway hospitality, to institutional food services, and now to the policy infrastructure of the American economy.
The Soweto Wine Festival was the first proof of concept.
The Federal Reserve Board is the current one.
The following sources were fetched and read directly in the reporting of this profile. All factual claims are drawn from these documents.
Wikipedia — Selena Cuffe Primary biographical reference; personal history, family lineage, education, United Airlines and P&G career, CIEE role, Heritage Link Brands founding and portfolio, SodexoMAGIC appointment, Blackstone Consulting role, Federal Reserve appointment, awards, board memberships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selena_Cuffe
PR Newswire — Magic Johnson Enterprises and Sodexo Name Selena Cuffe as President of SodexoMAGIC (March 3, 2020) SodexoMAGIC appointment confirmed; 1,700 U.S. client sites and 6,500 employees confirmed; 70 million liters sold confirmed; Earvin Johnson quote sourced directly; Sarosh Mistry quote sourced directly; Heritage Link MWBE certification confirmed; Stanford BA and Harvard MBA confirmed; Delta Sigma Theta membership confirmed; Council on Foreign Relations life membership confirmed; HBS alumni board role confirmed https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/magic-johnson-enterprises-and-sodexo-name-selena-cuffe-as-president-of-sodexomagic-301015068.html
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco — Membership Announcements for the Los Angeles Branch Board of Directors (January 10, 2024) Federal Reserve Board appointment confirmed; title at time of appointment confirmed; effective date of January 1, 2024 confirmed https://www.frbsf.org/news-and-media/news-articles/press-releases/2024/01/los-angeles-branch-board-of-directors-membership-announcements-2024/
Today's Builders is a series by The Black Executive Journal profiling the founders, operators, investors, and executives shaping Black and African business right now — the dealmakers closing rounds, the operators building institutions, the strategists entering new markets and constructing lasting economic infrastructure across the diaspora economy in real time.
