Charles Butt
Illustration by Stephanie Jones for Forbes; Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images
With $34 billion in revenues from 425 stores, this century-old grocery chain has made its family owners super wealthy.
With fresh tortillas made in-store and some of the best barbeque in Texas, grocery store chain H-E-B has a cult-like popularity that reaches beyond its regional footprint. Known for its private label foods and for customizing each store to its specific location, H-E-B has 425 stores across Texas and Mexico and revenue of $34 billion. It’s the largest private company in Texas and one of the state’s largest employers, with 145,000 employees. Prior to the pandemic, H-E-B would ship orders to states across the U.S. and to military bases worldwide, including favorite Texan barbecue sauces.
All of this has turned four members of the Butt family into billionaires worth $14 billion combined. The extended Butt family owns approximately 90% of the San Antonio-based firm, which Forbes currently values H-E-B at just over $17 billion. The rest is owned by employees through an ownership program the company created in 2015. Two of the family members that own this 117-year-old company made the 2022 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. H-E-B Chairman Charles Butt, age 84, returns to The Forbes 400 at No. 104 after a six-year absence, with an estimated $7.5 billion share of the family fortune. He is joined by his 90-year-old sister, Eleanor Butt Crook, a newcomer to the list at No. 380 with $2.8 billion. Charles owns a bit more than one-third of the company, Forbes estimates, while his sister Eleanor and her children own about half that amount. Brothers Howard Butt III and Stephen Butt, nephews of Charles and Eleanor, are each worth an estimated $1.9 billion, below this year’s $2.7 billion cutoff for The Forbes 400 list. It’s thanks to these new estimates of individual family members’ stakes in the company that has enabled Forbes to add the Butts to the Forbes 400 list. A spokesperson for H-E-B had no comment on Forbes’ net worth estimates.
Both Charles and Eleanor are grandchildren of H-E-B founder Florence Butt. She started the company in a small town in the Texas hill country in 1905 after her husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was unable to work. Her son Howard E. Butt, father of Charles and Eleanor, took over in the 1920s. He expanded the business from a mom-and-pop grocery store to a chain with stores across Texas. Howard’s initials became the name of the company.
Charles got his start as a bag boy at age 8 in the 1940s. He succeeded his father as chairman and CEO in 1971, when he was 33. Under his leadership, H-E-B launched its first Central Market store in Austin in 1994 and three years later opened its first store in Mexico. Central Market offers organic and gourmet foods and was launched as a rival to Whole Foods, another Austin-based grocery chain (before it was acquired by Amazon in 2017). Today there are 10 Central Market locations throughout Texas and 75 H-E-B stores in Mexico; in Texas it also operates discount chain Joe V’s and stores under the Mi Tienda brand for the Hispanic market. Revenues were less than $300 million when Charles became CEO and rose to $34 billion when he stepped down in 2021, according to the company.
Crook has no role in day-to-day operations at H-E-B, though she does serve on the company’s board of directors. She and her late husband, Ambassador William Crook (he served as U.S. ambassador to Australia under President Lyndon Johnson), started the Eleanor Crook Foundation in 1997. Her foundation is focused on fighting malnutrition and has made $70 million in grants through 2020 and had nearly $70 million in assets as of 2020, the most recent filing available. None of Eleanor’s three children work for the company.
Howard–a son of Charles and Eleanor’s brother Howard Butt, Jr. (d. 2016)–is CEO of H-E-B. He took over in 2021 when Charles stepped down. Stephen, Howard’s younger brother, is president of the Central Market banner, which he’s led since 1999. The company says that it annually donates 5% of its pretax profits to charitable groups that address hunger, education, health and more.
One of the groups H-E-B donates to is the Charles Butt Foundation, which made grants of nearly $80 million from 2014 through 2019 primarily to support public education. In 2019 the foundation made a $13 million donation to The Holdsworth Center, which was founded by Charles Butt in 2017 and works with public school educators in Texas to strengthen their leadership. Butt named the center for his mother, Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth, who was a school teacher. On the group’s website, Charles Butt says, “I named the center for my mom because she was for the kids.”