Spotlighting Our Services: Retail Innovation Center of Excellence July 1, 2021 As Retail Business Services continues to grow and evolve to support retailers on their omnichannel journeys, our teams are evolving too. This summer, we’re highlighting department leaders and their teams in our new Spotlighting Our Services series. This week Erin DeWaters, Director of Communications, sat down for a video interview with Heather Paquette, Vice President of the newly created Retail Innovation Center of Excellence, to learn more about this exciting function. “The concept of Retail Business Services supporting the great brands with innovation is not new,” Heather said. “But the Retail Innovation Center of Excellence is a different way of organizing the work, resourcing the work and bringing the work together with IT and other business partners in a bigger and more formal way.” Heather and her team identify trends, innovations and insights in the market – particularly in the IT arena – and help tailor these cutting-edge solutions for brand partners. The Retail Innovation Center of Excellence ensures consistency by managing projects from start to finish, through discovery, evaluation, testing and handoff for implementation. It’s an area that Heather is familiar with, as she spent more than 20 years in Retail Operations with Hannaford. During this time, she experienced many different leaders at the local brands working to solve similar problems – which made a strong business case for developing the Retail Innovation Center of Excellence. “We’re all trying to do the right thing, and we’re all trying to do the same thing, in a lot of ways,” she said. “So it makes sense for Retail Business Services to play a leadership role in that, to help organize the work, to help resource the work and to help provide that prioritization connection to IT so the work can move faster and be better.” Overall, the Retail Innovation Center of Excellence works to improve the experience of associates and shoppers alike. The newly formed team brings talent from Retail Business Services, Peapod Digital Labs, The GIANT Company, Stop & Shop and Hannaford to support the structured approach to retail innovation. In the days to come, the remaining hires for the team will be announced, consisting of talent from other brands as well as Supply Chain. “It’s a great team and I’m very excited for the opportunity to work with such talented leaders,” Heather said. Look for more Spotlighting Our Services stories in the weeks ahead! .