Yum Brands to Seat New Member on Leadership Team

Clay Johnson, chief digital and technology officer of Yum Brands, will shift to a senior advisor role come March 1.

At that time, Johnson will hand the baton to Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer for Pizza Hut Global since 2021. Park initially joined Yum Brands in 2020 as its first chief innovation officer, leading the development of emerging tech, including AI and automation. Then, at Pizza Hut, Park led omnichannel customer experiences, e-commerce and restaurant technologies for more than 19,000 Pizza Hut restaurants in more than 100 countries. He oversaw rollouts of an AI-based platform for optimizing and managing the food preparation process from order through delivery, as well as a “coach-in-your-pocket” app for managers—both of which have been deployed in thousands of units. Before Yum brands, he held executive leadership roles at Walmart and GE.

Now, as CDTO, Park will join the brand’s leadership team and oversee the company’s global technology strategy, partnering with the KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and the Habit Burger Grill divisions to ensure a “best-in-class digital experience” for customers and restaurant staff, plus strong economics for 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 Park has been an exceptional partner on this journey over the past few years,” says CFO Chris Turner. “Joe is an energizing and visionary leader with a proven track record of rapidly deploying modern e-commerce and data platforms and scaling innovative technologies like Dragontail and HutBot across Pizza Hut’s global system. 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.”

Yum Brands says its strategy is to own differentiated technology platforms tailored for each brand and market. In 2022, Yum Brands reached a peak of $24 billion in digital sales—double its digital business since 2019. Now, it says it is progressing toward achieving $30 billion in annual digital sales.