Dive Brief:

• Peapod Digital Labs, the e-commerce, digital and commercial arm of Ahold Delhaize USA's banners, announced Tuesday that Ian Prisuta is its new senior vice president of private brands.
• Prisuta, who most recently worked as a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group, brings to his new role roughly 20 years' experience at Giant Eagle, where he served in merchandising, business systems and supply chain roles. 
• Prisuta is joining at a time when Ahold Delhaize is reshaping and expanding its private label offerings.  

Dive Insight:

Prisuta is coming on at a time when Ahold Delhaize is seeing growth for its private labels, JJ Fleeman, president of digital and commercial services for Peapod Digital Labs, said in a statement.

As SVP of private brands, Prisuta will head up the team behind private brands for Ahold Delhaize's U.S. banners. The team works on new product development, product packaging, design, quality and sustainability. Prisuta will oversee the entire private label suite for Ahold Delhaize's five U.S. banners, including labels like Nature's Promise, CareOne and Taste of Inspirations. 

Fleeman said Prisuta will play a role in the company creating private label items with "compelling" price and product positioning, along with an engaging story to grab customers' attention. 

Peapod Digital Labs honed in on Prisuta's "deep knowledge" of merchandising, category planning and strategic development in announcing his hiring, calling him "an accomplished business executive with extensive experience leading transformations across multiple areas within the retail supermarket business."

Prior to coming to Peapod Digital Labs, Prisuta worked at Boston Consulting Group for a year and a half, following roughly 20 years with Giant Eagle, according to his LinkedIn profile.  At Giant Eagle, he climbed the corporate ladder from supply chain manager to director and then vice president of business systems before holding several senior roles for business systems and merchandising. Prisuta was responsible for private brands, direct sourcing and sales when he was senior vice president of merchandising. 

Prisuta's appointment comes on the heels of a high-level departure in Ahold Delhaize's private brand operations. Juan de Paoli served as senior vice president of private brands for the company for nearly three years before departing in November 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. He recently joined Kroger as head of store brands. 

At Peapod Digital Labs, Prisuta joins Jeff Bobbitt on the private brands team. Bobbitt is vice president of private brands and has been at the company since June 2019, bringing experience from Walmart, convenience store chain Kangaroo Express and Family Dollar.

Ahold Delhaize USA unveiled plans in 2018 for its services branch, Retail Business Services, to make its private label products cleaner and more natural by 2025. Since then, the company's banners have rolled out new kids products, a wine label and cook-in-bag prepared meals. 

In late 2020, Ahold Delhaize said it planned to add between 1,500 to 2,000 private label products in 2021 and set a goal of having more than half of its own brands sales come from healthy products by 2022, according to Store Brands. 

Retailers including Target, Walmart and Kroger have also made recent pushes to expand  private label, from adding new labels to creating line extensions. Although store brand sales slowed early in the pandemic as shoppers turned to national brands, experts expect private label sales to accelerate this year as retailers battle inflation and supply chain shortages.