Yum! Brands names new global chief digital and tech officer

Yum! Brands, the owner of KFC and Pizza Hut, has promoted Joe Park (pictured) to chief digital and technology officer, reporting to Chris Turner, Yum! Brands chief financial officer, effective 1 March, 2024.

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

Within his new role, Park will join the Yum! Brands global leadership team and oversees the company’s global technology strategy, partnering with the KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and the Habit Burger Grill divisions to ensure the company provides a best-in-class digital experience for customers and restaurant team members and strong economics for franchisees.

Park joined Yum! Brands 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 recent role, Park was responsible for leading omnichannel customer experiences, eCommerce and restaurant technologies for more than 19,000 Pizza Hut restaurants in more than 100 countries.

At Pizza Hut, Park oversaw the rollout of Dragontail’s AI-based platform for optimising and managing 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 joining Yum! Brands, Park held executive leadership positions at Walmart and GE. At Walmart, Park was VP of associate digital experience and enterprise architecture, overseeing 2,000 employees and providing technology to the largest private sector workforce in the world, modernising platforms, digitising processes and transforming user experiences.

“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,” said Turner.

“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 Park has been an exceptional partner on this journey over the past few years,” he added.

Park is an energising and visionary leader with a proven track record of rapidly deploying modern eCommerce and data platforms and scaling innovative technologies such as Dragontail and HutBot across Pizza Hut’s global system, he said.

“I’m confident that Joe 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 said: “I’m incredibly excited to continue working with the talented and dedicated digital and technology team members around the world, and to partner with our world-class franchisees to execute the company’s global technology strategy.”

“I’m grateful to have worked alongside Johnson at Yum! Brands since 2020 and 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,” he added.

Yum!’s overall strategy is to own differentiated technology platforms tailored for each brand and market that enable easy experiences for customers. In 2022, Yum! Brands reached a new high of US$24 billion in digital sales – doubling its digital business since 2019.

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