Yum! promotes Pizza Hut tech chief to global digital role

KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell parent company Yum! Brands is aiming to further ramp up its customer experience with the appointment of a new chief digital and technology officer tasked with continuing the group’s online sales expansion.

Joe Park was most recently chief digital and technology officer for Pizza Hut Global and succeeds Clay Johnson, who will continue with Yum as a senior advisor.

Reporting to chief financial officer Chris Turner, Park will join the Yum’s global leadership team and oversee the company’s global technology strategy across its brand portfolio, which also includes The Habit Burger Grill.

All four brands have their own loyalty schemes, The KFC Rewards Arcade, Pizza Hut Rewards, Taco Bell Rewards and the Habit CharClub, which sit at the heart of Yum’s group digital and data strategy.

Park joined Yum in 2020 as its first chief innovation officer and has been at Pizza Hut Global since 2021. In his most recent role, he was responsible for leading omnichannel customer experiences, ecommerce and restaurant technologies for more than 19,000 Pizza Hut restaurants in more than 100 countries.

Park also oversaw the rollout of an AI-based platform, provided by Dragontail, which optimises and managed the entire food preparation process from order through delivery, and HutBot, Pizza Hut’s “coach-in-your-pocket” app for managers, both of which have been deployed in thousands of restaurants across multiple markets.

Prior to that, Park held executive leadership positions at Walmart and GE, modernising platforms, digitising processes and transforming user experiences.

Turner said: “We’re ingraining digital and technology into all aspects of our business with exciting new capabilities that make things easy for customers and restaurant team members, while driving profitable growth for Yum and our franchisees.

“We’ve made great progress enhancing digital ordering, implementing technologies to improve restaurant operations, leveraging data to enable smart decision-making and piloting emerging technologies, and Joe has been an exceptional partner on this journey over the past few years.

“I’m confident that he will help Yum continue to strengthen our technology ecosystem and scale our digital solutions at a rapid pace to deliver leading-edge capabilities to our franchisees with advantaged economics.”

Park added: “I look forward to continuing to help the company drive its initiatives to deliver a best-in-class digital experience for customers and restaurant team members alike.”

The company, which has over 51,000 restaurants in more than 150 countries and territories, launched an in-house UK data academy in 2021 as part of plans to boost the data literacy of its workforce and strengthen the restaurant business’ digital and analytical strategy.

In 2022, Yum reached a new high of $24bn in digital sales – doubling its digital business since 2019.

As part of this strategy, last week, Pizza Hut UK, Ireland & France recruited new chief marketing officer Jana Ulaite, with a brief to transform it into a younger, more culturally relevant, and digital-first brand.