A hire that matches the actual bottleneck
Kroger announced on August 11 that Nate Faust will join as Executive Vice President and Chief E-Commerce Officer effective September 1, a newly created position at the company. Faust co-founded Jet.com, the mass-merchandise marketplace built around a dynamic 'Smart Cart' pricing model that rewarded efficient shopping baskets, and served as its Chief Operating Officer overseeing merchandising, replenishment, fulfillment and customer service before Walmart acquired the company in 2016. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S.E. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton, an academic background that matches the operations-heavy roles he has held ever since.
After the acquisition, Faust became SVP of Walmart U.S. e-commerce supply chain, leading a multi-year transformation of delivery operations. Before Jet.com, he was at Diapers.com building what the company describes as the fastest fulfillment and delivery network in e-commerce at the time, with nationwide one- and two-day shipping and same-day delivery in key markets. Most recently he ran Olive, focused on waste-free delivery and returns for brands including Rhone, Cynthia Rowley and Rent the Runway. That is a resume built almost entirely around fulfillment economics, not front-end merchandising, which tells you exactly what problem Kroger thinks it still has to solve.
Grocery e-commerce just crossed a threshold worth naming
The context Kroger did not have to spell out but is central to the decision: the company has reported double-digit online sales growth and first-time e-commerce profitability in recent quarters. That distinction matters enormously for how you read this hire. Faust is not walking into a rescue mission where the mandate is to stop the bleeding, he is walking into a business that has already crossed into profitability and is being handed to someone whose job is to scale it, not save it.
CEO Greg Foran, who took the top job in February 2026, put the strategic logic directly: 'Most of the growth in grocery today is happening online. That's where the customer is moving, and that's where we have to lead.' Foran also credited Faust with building businesses 'that redefined what customers expect from eCommerce, built on speed, value and the experience of getting exactly what the customer ordered,' which reads as a direct callback to the fulfillment precision Faust built at Diapers.com and Walmart.
The asset Kroger thinks it is underusing
Faust's own comment on joining names the assets he intends to lean on: 'Kroger has deep customer relationships, unmatched loyalty data and a footprint that puts us closer to customers.' That is a specific claim about underused inputs, not a generic statement about digital ambition. Kroger's loyalty program and store network are genuine structural advantages over pure-play grocery delivery competitors who have neither the first-party purchase history nor the physical proximity to fulfill quickly.
For a CTO or CIO at a grocery or CPG-adjacent retailer, the question this hire raises is whether your own loyalty and transaction data is actually being operationalized into e-commerce decisioning today, or whether it sits in a data warehouse feeding quarterly reports while your digital storefront runs generic recommendation logic. Kroger's bet is that closing that gap, turning loyalty data into a live input for fulfillment routing, assortment and personalization, is worth building an entire new C-suite role around.
Fulfillment cost discipline as the real e-commerce moat
Grocery e-commerce has been notoriously hard to make profitable because pick, pack and last-mile costs eat margin that is already thin compared to general merchandise. Faust's background at Olive, building waste-free delivery and returns systems, and at Walmart, transforming e-commerce supply chain, suggests Kroger is explicitly hiring for cost-to-serve discipline rather than for growth-at-any-cost digital marketing. That is a meaningfully different hiring pattern than the typical 'Chief Digital Officer' brought in from a pure marketing or UX background, and it tells competitors what Kroger believes is actually holding back grocery e-commerce margin today.
The lesson for enterprise retail technology leaders is about sequencing. Kroger appears to have decided that scaling e-commerce profitably is fundamentally a supply chain and operations problem wearing an e-commerce title, and staffed accordingly. If your organization's e-commerce leadership is weighted toward merchandising and marketing talent with no deep fulfillment operations expertise, that is worth stress-testing against where your actual unit economics are breaking down. Pull the last twelve months of cost-to-serve data by order type and see whether the biggest margin leak sits in acquisition and conversion or in pick, pack and last-mile execution before deciding where your next senior digital hire should come from.
The competitive read for Walmart and Amazon
There is an obvious subtext to Kroger hiring a former Walmart e-commerce supply chain executive: it is a direct talent play against the company that still sets the pace in grocery digital fulfillment. Walmart's scale advantage in grocery e-commerce comes substantially from the supply chain discipline Faust himself helped build during his years there, and Kroger is betting that hiring the architect is faster than trying to reverse-engineer the playbook from the outside. Amazon, through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, remains the other structural threat Kroger has to answer, and a fulfillment-first e-commerce chief is a more direct response to Amazon's logistics advantage than a marketing-led digital strategy would be.
For competitors watching this from outside the big three, the signal is that grocery e-commerce competition has moved past the phase where a decent app and curbside pickup were sufficient differentiation. The next phase is a fulfillment cost and speed war, and Kroger just staffed for it specifically rather than generally. Any regional or mid-market grocer without a credible answer to that shift in their own digital leadership bench should treat this hire as a preview of the talent and capability gap they will be competing against within the next two to three quarters.
What to watch in Faust's first two quarters
Watch for three things once Faust starts September 1. First, whether Kroger's loyalty data gets more visibly integrated into online personalization and inventory allocation, since that is the specific asset both Faust and Foran called out. Second, whether delivery and pickup cost-to-serve metrics improve, given Faust's fulfillment pedigree at three prior companies. Third, whether Kroger makes any acquisitions or partnership moves in the returns or last-mile space, an area where Faust has direct founder-level experience through Olive, which built waste-free delivery and returns programs for fashion and lifestyle brands before this move.
This hire is part of a broader wave of retailers naming dedicated digital and AI leadership this month, alongside Target's new Chief AI Officer and Sainsbury's new head of AI Centre of Excellence. The pattern across all three is consistent: boards are no longer content with e-commerce and AI as shared responsibilities distributed across existing functional leaders. They want one accountable executive with a specific, provable background in the actual bottleneck, and they are willing to create net-new C-suite roles to get it, even in a sector where cost discipline is otherwise the dominant theme of the year.
