Campbell Soup Co. has hired an online retail veteran and created an e-commerce unit in North America to bolster its e-commerce push.
Shakeel Farooque
Shakeel Farooque starts as vice president and head of digital and e-commerce at Campbell on Monday, a newly created position within the company.
Campbell does not currently sell directly to consumers through its own website, although that is expected to change, according to a Campbell spokeswoman. “We are exploring a wide variety of models and plan to test direct to consumer in the future,” she says.
Farooque brings with him a deep e-commerce resume, having most recently been senior vice president of e-commerce at Kohl’s Corp., No. 18 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, a position he has held since July 2015. He also spent nearly four years with eBay Inc. and eight years with Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1), where his roles included working on Fulfillment By Amazon as well as business development and product management.
Farooque’s hiring is part of Campbell’s broader strategy, announced this week at its annual investor meeting, to ramp up its digital marketing and e-commerce efforts. The announcement comes two months after Campbell led a $10 million funding round for online food ordering service Chef’d, No. 838 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000. At its investor meeting, Campbell cited the Chef’d investment and said it plans to partner with leading e-commerce companies and take steps to “create a more flexible distribution system to serve e-commerce channels.”
Mark Alexander, president-Americas Simple Meals and Beverages at Campbell, said Farooque’s experience is key to helping Campbell’s reach its target of $300 million in online sales by 2022.
“Shakeel is a builder—a builder of organizations, ideas, partnerships and solutions,” Alexander said. “That’s exactly what we need him to do here. E-commerce is a significant growth opportunity for Campbell, and it represents the future of food commerce.”
Campbell does have a recipe building website called CampbellsKitchen.com which acts as a sort of affiliate marketing site. The company posts recipes on the site that incorporate its products and then offers links so that shoppers can buy those products online, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (No. 3), Target Corp. (No. 20) and Peapod LLC (No. 62).
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