The Hershey Co. recently named Deepak Bhatia as its first chief technology officer, effective Oct. 23.
Bhatia will also be a member of the executive committee.
In his new role, Bhatia will lead the company’s global technology strategy, designing and deploying digital capabilities.
“We are investing in our people and digital capabilities to strengthen our infrastructure and scale across our growing supply chain and business units,” Michele Buck, Hershey president and CEO, said. “As we continue to double down in this area, Deepak has the expertise needed to successfully lead our technology strategy leveraging end-to-end data, analytics and automation to elevate our employee experience, create commercial value and advance our leading snacking powerhouse vision.”
Bhatia previously served as Amazon’s vice president of supply chain optimization technologies. He led the development of large-scale automated decision-making systems. In this role, he mixed software engineering and product management.
Bhatia also worked for Applied Materials where, in addition to, he also built expertise in predictive business analytics to inform product management and innovation strategies, and addressed supply chain optimization.
A Seattle resident, Bhatia earned degrees in management science and engineering and aeronautics and astronautics engineering.
Hershey employs nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. The company has annual revenues of more than $10.4 billion.