Dive Brief:

• Albertsons has named Danielle Crop its senior vice president and first chief data officer, the grocery company announced on Thursday.
• Crop was most recently the chief data officer at American Express, where she also gained experience with card acquisition fraud, data and product management, and modeling.
• After roughly 15 years at American Express, Crop is coming to Albertsons at a time when the grocer is seeking to further capitalize on its growth in e-commerce and loyalty programs.

Dive Insight:

As consumers' eating habits shift and e-commerce’s role in the grocery industry swells, food retailers are increasingly turning to their customer data. By understanding these evolving shopping behaviors, grocers can figure out how to retain and boost sales gained during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Albertsons President and CEO Vivek Sankaran has said during recent earnings calls that the company plans to wield its loyalty programs to increase its sales and deepen engagement with new and existing customers. The grocer has been expanding its Just 4 U loyalty program to more areas. Albertsons has 25.4 million loyalty club members, and loyalty club members spend 2.6 times more than unregistered customers, Sankaran said during the Q4 earnings call on April 26.

“How we translate what we get from data into an enhanced customer experience will further differentiate us as a locally great and nationally strong retailer,” Chris Rupp, Albertsons’s executive vice president and chief digital officer, said in a statement. Rupp has been the grocer’s chief digital officer since November 2019. 

Crop became American Express’s chief data officer in February 2020 after serving in a variety of high-level roles overseeing application experience. She started as the director of card acquisition fraud and during her career at the credit card company, she helped create its new big data platform and a large team of software developers and designers across the world, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

She is also a co-founder of the Phoenix, Arizona, chapter of the nonprofit Women in Product, which works to help women in software product management, and has been a board member of the Habitat for Humanity Central Arizona since 2019, according to her profile.

Albertsons isn’t the only grocer investing in the chief data officer role — a corporate position that emerged in the early 2000s. Earlier this month, Hy-Vee named a new chief data officer, bringing on Jason Buhrow, who was previously the business technology vice president for FBL Financial Group, Inc.