Tesco’s online chief Chris Poad is departing the supermarket to take on a role at Google.
Poad, MD of online at Tesco since October 2019, led the supermarket’s online teams as they tackled soaring lockdown-induced demand for home deliveries and click & collect.
Tesco increased the number of online orders fulfilled each week from 590,000 in the first week of the crisis, to a peak of more than 1.4 million. Tesco is still fulfilling around 1.2 million online orders each week.
Poad joined the supermarket from Amazon, where he had spent more than a decade, most recently as director of Amazon Business international.
He started in his new role as MD, retail solutions EMEA at Google’s cloud computing business Google Cloud this morning.
“Leading Tesco’s online business has been one of the most rewarding and, at times, intense periods of my career,” Poad said in a LinkedIn post today. “We doubled the size of the business, launched new services, and supported millions of customers at a time when they really needed us.”
Poad added that he was “hugely proud of the team and the strategy I leave behind” and that he’d had “a fantastic few years at Tesco”.
As well as handling pandemic demand, Poad was behind the launch of Tesco’s automated micro-fulfilment centres, its rapid delivery service Whoosh fulfilled from Tesco’s convenience store estate, and the supermarket’s programme to get food to almost a million vulnerable people during the pandemic, which it has claimed was “likely the largest programme of its type in the world”.
Tom Denyard has been named as Poad’s replacement. Denyard joins the role from the CEO position at Tesco Mobile, which he has held since late 2019. He has previously worked for Unilever and M&S.
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