Digital commerce is big business in Yum Brands Inc., operator of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell fast food restaurants.
Now the corporate, which does $30 billion annually in digitally enabled sales, has a brand new chief digital officer.
Yum promoted Joe Park to chief digital and technology officer. In the brand new role, he reports to Chris Turner, Yum Brands chief financial officer, effective March 1, 2024.
Yum’s latest chief digital officer
Park most recently served as chief digital and technology officer for Pizza Hut Global. In his upgraded capability, he succeeds Clay Johnson, who will proceed with Yum Brands as a senior advisor.
As chief digital and technology officer, Park will join the Yum Brands global leadership group. He’ll lead the corporate’s global technology strategy, partnering with the KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and the Habit Burger Grill divisions to make sure “a best-in-class digital experience for purchasers and restaurant team members and powerful economics for franchisees,” Yum says.
Park joined Yum in 2020 as its first chief innovation officer and has served as chief digital and technology officer for Pizza Hut Global since 2021.
In his most up-to-date role, Park led omnichannel customer experiences, ecommerce and restaurant technologies for greater than 19,000 Pizza Hut restaurants in greater than 100 countries.
At Pizza Hut, Park oversaw the rollout of Dragontail’s AI-based platform for optimizing and managing your complete food preparation process from order through delivery, and HutBot, Pizza Hut’s “coach-in-your-pocket” app for managers, each of which have been deployed in hundreds of restaurants across multiple markets.
In his previous role as chief innovation officer, Park led the event of emerging technologies, including leveraging artificial intelligence and automation to streamline operations in the corporate’s restaurant kitchens.
Before joining Yum Brands, Park held executive leadership positions at Walmart and GE. At Walmart, Park was vice chairman of associate digital experience and enterprise architecture, overseeing 2,000 employees.
Yum 2023 results
In 2023, Yum grew digitally enabled sales to $30 billion, CEO David Gibbs told analysts on a recent earnings call. “Together with the record-breaking success we’ve had on development, our digital strategy has helped propel top-line results and improve bottom-line profits,” he said. “Digital sales approached $30 billion in 2023, up 22% 12 months over 12 months, with mix now exceeding 45%. At the identical time, we have now accelerated the deployment of our proprietary technologies to optimize back-of-house operations and make it easier to run our restaurants.”
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