Kroger Names Nate Faust EVP and Chief eCommerce Officer

What happened

Kroger has appointed Nate Faust as Executive Vice President and Chief eCommerce Officer, according to reporting from Morningstar and Mass Market Retailers. The move brings digital and online grocery leadership directly into the company's C-suite, signalling that ecommerce now sits alongside core merchandising and operations as a top-table priority for the US grocery giant.

Details on Faust's remit remain limited in current reporting, but the creation and elevation of this specific title indicates Kroger is consolidating its digital grocery strategy — spanning online ordering, delivery, pickup and related customer-facing technology — under a single senior executive with direct reporting lines to leadership.

Why it matters

Grocery retail has increasingly become a hybrid experience, blending physical stores with app-based ordering, substitution logic, delivery windows and loyalty-driven personalisation. Elevating ecommerce to a dedicated C-suite role suggests Kroger sees digital grocery not as a channel bolted onto stores, but as a distinct experience discipline requiring its own strategic ownership — one where friction points like out-of-stock substitutions, delivery reliability and app usability directly shape customer loyalty and lifetime value.

For CX and behavioural-economics practitioners, this is a useful signal of how retailers are structuring accountability for digital experience. When ecommerce has its own seat at the leadership table, decisions about checkout design, delivery promises, and personalisation are more likely to be made with customer psychology and retention economics in mind, rather than treated purely as a logistics or IT function.

The Renascence take

Titles matter less than what they unlock. The real story here isn't the appointment itself but what it implies about how grocery retailers are starting to organise around experience rather than around channel.

Most coverage of executive appointments treats them as reshuffles; the more useful read is structural. Giving ecommerce a standalone C-suite seat is an admission that digital grocery has its own behavioural rules — substitution anxiety, delivery-time sensitivity, basket-building friction — that don't map neatly onto in-store merchandising logic. The operators who benefit won't be the ones who simply promoted a digital leader, but those who use the mandate to redesign decision rights: giving the ecommerce chief real authority over fulfilment trade-offs, not just app design. Watch whether Kroger's move translates into measurable changes in delivery reliability and substitution handling — that's where the customer actually feels the reorganisation, not in the title.