Dive Brief:
- Tom Peck, EVP and chief information and digital officer at Sysco Corp., is resigning from his position effective April 10 after five years with the company to pursue another opportunity, according to a March 27 securities filing.
- Navin Advani, who is currently serving as Sysco’s CIO for the Americas and VP of technology, global supply chain and merchandising technology, will assume responsibility of the technology organization as the company’s interim CIO, a Sysco spokesperson told CIO Dive, adding that the company “is confident there will be a smooth transition” under his leadership.
- Peck, an IT veteran with prior stints at NBC Universal, Levi Strauss and Ingram Micro, is the latest member of Sysco’s C-suite to depart in recent months. In January, EVP and Global COO Greg Bertrand transitioned to a non-executive senior advisor role in preparation for his retirement. In February, EVP and CFO Kenny Cheung announced his resignation. Cheung plans to remain in an advisory role until April 17 and will join McKesson as EVP and CFO in May.
Dive Insight:
Peck joined Sysco in 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the multinational food distributor quickly pivoted from the halting restaurant industry toward supporting retail grocery providers.
The pandemic also ushered in an opportunity for focused digital transformation at the company. Sysco unveiled its Recipe for Growth initiative in May 2021, nearly six months into Peck’s tenure, with the aim of helping the company grow 1.5 times faster than the market by fiscal year 2024.
Technology was core to the plan, a five-pillar initiative that included basic tenets such as better supply chain delivery performance and omnichannel inventory management but also highlighted customer experience and personalized digital tools. Peck was brought in to help connect backend infrastructure to customer-facing technologies or, as he put it in a podcast interview, “We’re trying to take the traditional B2B company and deliver what I call B2C or consumer-like experiences.”
Now Peck is exiting the company as it faces another pivotal moment.
In March, Sysco announced plans to acquire restaurant supply wholesaler Jetro Restaurant Depot for $29 billion, the company’s largest acquisition to date. The deal, which is expected to close by Q3 2027, opens Sysco up to a new channel of small and independent restaurant customers and embeds the company more deeply into a cash-and-carry rather than delivery business model.
CEO Kevin Hourican believes building a partnership between Sysco and Restaurant Depot on procurement and logistics objectives won’t require deep technology integration.
“We’re not going to go in and just change technology to change technology,” Hourican told investors in March. “Their ERP works, their HR system works, their POS system works. We don’t need to provide them a routing system or a WMS because they’re running stores. But where we do have an opportunity to help each other, we will. So an example of that would be data sharing.”
During his tenure as CIO, Peck said people were a critical part of a company’s digital transformation success. “When you transition from being a traditional CIO who delivers technology to more of a transformative person driving change within the company, it’s important to win the hearts and minds [of employees],” Peck said during a panel discussion at the 2023 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.
The company has since evolved its Recipe for Growth strategy to focus on core performance, but technology continues to provide necessary support especially for data accessibility as generative AI has taken root.
Last year, Sysco rolled out its AI360 CRM tool to improve selling productivity. It plans to add Swap and Save functionality later this year so that sales reps can prioritize recommendations to customers that can save them money, Hourican told investors during a Q2 2026 earnings call in January.
“The key is in the data, knowing which items are acceptable solutions and substitutions,” he said.
