Deepak Bhatia, Hershey | Modern Retail Vanguard 2024
This is part of the Modern Retail Vanguard, a series highlighting the behind-the-scenes talent powering the world’s top retail brands. More from the series →
Deepak Bhatia, Hershey’s first-ever chief technology officer, is attracted to roles that solve tangible problems.
“I don’t believe in [the mindset of], we have this technology, let’s find a problem that this will fit into,” he says.
Before joining Hershey, Bhatia was at Amazon for 12 years, working his way up to become the vice president of supply chain optimization technologies. There, he led a team that developed systems to automate inventory buying and placement decisions.
At Hershey, the problems that Bhatia are tasked with solving are more cultural. Historically, technology has been viewed as a support function within the CPG conglomerate. Bhatia sees his role as not just overseeing Hershey’s technology strategy, but reorganizing it in a way so that technology is a leading driver of long-term profitable growth. It’s a critical position at a time when some of the tech experiments from CPG conglomerates, from chatbots to AI-generated ads, can feel like a flash in the pan.
“It’s transforming how we work, transforming how we organize ourselves,” Bhatia says.
Bhatia joined Hershey last year. At the time, the company was in the middle of implementing a new ERP system, which “also builds a solid foundation for us to build a lot of standardized analytics” Bhatia says.
Most importantly, Bhatia is rethinking where tech talent is embedded within the organization. The goal is to build tech teams that can move fast, but also aren’t siloed off from the rest of the company. That means ensuring that a data science team tasked with developing algorithms to optimize media budgets works not just with data scientists but also media buyers.
“I’ve seen over the years that data science is most effective when data scientists and engineers are in the trenches with the operators,” Bhatia says. He’s identified a few core enterprise functions, like supply chain and finance, where Hershey can experiment with a new way of organizing teams and talent and figure out what works for the company before rolling out any business-wide changes.
Longterm, Bhatia’s vision is that in the next two to three years, Hershey “is seen as a big [tech] talent destination within CPG.”