The Digital Mandate
GoTo Foods, the Atlanta-based franchisor operating more than 7,500 restaurants, cafes, and bakeries across 72 countries under brands including Jamba, Cinnabon, Moe's Southwest Grill, and Auntie Anne's, has restructured its senior leadership with a notable technology signal at the center: Biplav Misra has been formally named Chief Digital & Technology Officer, consolidating the company's Digital, Technology, and Off-Premise functions under a single seat. The move, announced September 14, reflects a broader industry pattern of multi-unit operators collapsing fragmented tech and digital stacks into unified command structures to drive faster deployment and cleaner franchisee integration.
Misra had been overseeing technology on an interim basis for several months alongside his existing digital and off-premise portfolio. Bringing all three disciplines together is intended to accelerate how GoTo Foods builds and deploys guest-facing and franchisee-facing technology across its entire brand roster. With more than 20 years of experience scaling digital businesses, ecommerce platforms, and enterprise technologies — including senior roles at Albertsons Companies and Amazon — Misra brings a supply-chain-grade systems perspective to a foodservice operating environment where digital ordering, loyalty, and off-premise throughput have become competitive table stakes. For GoTo Foods' franchisee network, the practical implication is a single accountable leader governing everything from mobile ordering UX to back-end integrations, reducing the coordination friction that often slows multi-brand platform rollouts.
New Leadership, Growth Priorities
The structural change accompanies a broader leadership reset across the portfolio. Lucy Brady, most recently President of Grocery & Snacks at Conagra Brands where she managed a $5 billion portfolio of more than 60 brands, joins as President of Jamba. Brady's prior tenure at McDonald's included senior roles in strategy, innovation, and digital customer experience — she was instrumental in scaling MyMcDonald's Rewards, McDelivery, and digital ordering infrastructure, credentials that position her to drive Jamba's own digital and loyalty engagement. Francisco Bram, GoTo Foods' Chief Growth Officer, adds the Moe's Southwest Grill brand presidency to his existing remit, which spans loyalty, marketing, analytics, and consumer research — functions that feed directly into CRM and digital engagement strategy. Nathan Baldwin expands from President of Auntie Anne's to President of Specialty Brands, picking up Cinnabon, Carvel, and the company's co-brands strategy, a consolidation that creates economies of scale in shared digital infrastructure and co-location development.
What It Means for Operators
For franchise operators and the broader foodservice technology market, the GoTo Foods restructuring underscores a structural shift playing out across multi-unit restaurant groups: technology is no longer a back-office function but a brand-level growth lever, and operators are building executive accountability to match. The unified Digital & Technology role mirrors moves made by Yum! Brands, Restaurant Brands International, and Dine Brands, all of which have centralized digital and tech leadership to push POS integration, loyalty platform development, and off-premise channel management at enterprise scale. GoTo Foods' 7,500-unit footprint gives Misra's organization a large proving ground — and a clear commercial incentive — to tighten the loop between digital ordering, loyalty data, and franchisee-level operational tooling. CEO Omer Gajial framed the restructuring around "organizational agility" and franchisee support, but the underlying infrastructure play is that a unified tech-and-digital leader can compress the cycle time between product decisions and in-restaurant deployment across seven distinct brand environments.
For hospitality tech vendors — from loyalty and CRM platforms to digital ordering and delivery infrastructure providers — a newly empowered CDTO at a 7,500-unit operator represents a consolidated buying decision and a shorter path to enterprise-scale contracts.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
