(Adds dropped word “officer” in paragraph 1)
Dec 19 (Reuters) – Starbucks said on Friday it has appointed Anand Varadarajan as its new chief technology officer, effective January 19, as CEO Brian Niccol pushes a tech revamp in stores to make labor more efficient.
Varadarajan will fill the role after Deb Hall Lefevre stepped down in September, following which the coffee chain named Ningyu Chen as interim CTO.
Varadarajan comes after a 19-year stint at Amazon, where he headed the technology and supply chain operations for its worldwide grocery business. He has also previously worked at Oracle.
Starbucks posted its first quarter of gains in comparable sales after nearly a year and a half in late October, as the company started to see some returns from Niccol’s extensive turnaround efforts in the United States.
(Reporting by Sanskriti Shekhar in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)
