Hall of Fame Profile: Bobby Watts, Ahold Delhaize USA
Bobby Watts learned early on in life to take nothing for granted. It’s the way he has approached new opportunities in his career, and how he’s found success climbing through the ranks at Ahold Delhaize USA.
Watts has spent his entire career at the retailer, advocating for change at every step while being stretched across new functions, all to create a better customer experience.
Today, as senior vice president of AD Retail Media, digital merchandising and marketing, Watts oversees the teams inside the organization’s digital ecosystem, a strategy that enables the collective to provide the highest levels of customer engagement in the ever-changing world of retail.
He credits the rapid growth of retail media with the exponential impact on the organization’s framework in recent years, particularly in terms of how it thinks about partnering with its CPGs.
“We firmly believe in building omnichannel commercial plans that include all the great things that our merchant teams do,” he says. “But fully amplifying it with retail media is what makes it perform the best.”
Watts thrives on building and creating tools that are a catalyst for change — it’s what motivates him every day — and he leads his team in striving to be agents of that change. Together they are working on expanding beyond media channels and thinking about customer journey orchestration, using the combined capabilities of marketing and retail media to better serve their shoppers, their customers and their business.
The Early Years
A native of Thomasville, North Carolina, Watts grew up surrounded by high-quality furniture manufacturing, which brought people from all over the country to his small town. His parents held blue-collar jobs and raised him, his half-brother and half-sister to appreciate working hard for everything they had.
Watts joined Food Lion, headquartered in neighboring Salisbury, North Carolina, after graduating from high school. He started as a part-time produce clerk while attending North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he was studying to become an architectural engineer. Through a transfer to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to pivot to civil engineering, he continued to learn the retail business, being promoted to produce manager, assistant store manager, store manager and, ultimately, district manager.
At the time, Watts still saw his work as a way to pay his way through college. “I was kind of the ‘fix-it’ guy,” he says. “My father owned a construction company, and I was going to be an engineer and build and architect things.” But while still in college, he had the opportunity to join Food Lion in a corporate role, first as a category analyst and then as a category manager.
Watts shifted his focus away from engineering and finished his studies online, ultimately earning a degree in business management and leadership from Capella University in 2012. It was then that he started on his journey of building teams and organizations that stretch the norms of traditional retail.
Career Development
Watts continued in category management for the retailer before becoming a merchandising manager in 2014, responsible for all in-store display, advertising and shopper marketing planning.
In mid-2015, he took over managing the beer, wine, tobacco and spirits category, working on both the planning and buying sides of the business and collaborating with all seven banners that fell under the Delhaize America umbrella at the time.
Watts was then asked to be part of the Ahold Delhaize merger team in 2016, specifically tasked with bringing the category management teams together and negotiating with suppliers as the new Ahold Delhaize organization. He was charged with helping the organization find new ways of working and partnering across all of the new entities, working with team members in the category teams.
His next step was a director of A Brands Sourcing back at Food Lion’s headquarters for nearly three years starting in June 2016. “It was basically our negotiations arm working with CPG partners around mostly trade funding,” he says, adding that a side project at the time kept him working on defining omnichannel shopper marketing and commercial planning for a retail organization that had historically been focused solely on brick and mortar.
In early 2019, he made a move to Chicago to help stand up the company’s e-commerce merchandising arm at Peapod Digital Labs. Watts says e-commerce was less than 2% of the retailer’s overall business at the time, but he saw the value in it, especially as consumer behavior changed in the wake of the pandemic. He was the vice president and head of e-commerce merchandising, AD Retail Media, and led a team that grew the business significantly over the next few years.
“I’d like to think that the work we did in Chicago laid the foundation for our e-commerce center of excellence,” Watts says. “We built our own proprietary e-commerce platform and then sprung from that into our own proprietary fulfillment technology. I built a team on optimizing the digital shelf as part of that, and we had great success there.”
Watts credits his boss and CEO at the time, Keith Nicks, as his most influential mentor nearly every step of the way.
“What I have appreciated about him throughout my career is that he is not always looking for the expert on a particular subject, but for folks that have a high level of learning agility,” Watts says. “He sees the people who are willing to get in there and that he can count on to deliver results.”
When Ahold Delhaize USA wanted to bring its retail media efforts in-house for the first time, Nicks approached Watts once again, this time to set up a long-term strategy for a retail media arm.
“I remember telling him, ‘I have never done it before, but I know the merchant job pretty well, I can work with the merchants, I know marketing on the peripheral and I know e-commerce, so let me give it a shot,’” he says. “That’s how I got pulled into the retail media business, and I’ve been doing that since late 2021.”
Making His Mark at Ahold Delhaize
Initially charged with leading all retail media operations in the U.S., Watts later assumed e-commerce merchandising and then digital marketing responsibilities for the enterprise marketing side as well. His team grew from fewer than 10 to 200 strong in the nearly five years since he stepped into the role, and e-commerce now represents more than 10% of the retailers’ overall business.
He says the retailer will continue to double down efforts on building better features in its app and for consumers’ online experience. “We have very bold ambitions for e-commerce sales penetration, monthly active users on our app, and digitally engaged customers.”
To be sure, he and his team are not thinking about retail media by itself anymore, but more about how Ahold Delhaize is showing up with commercial plans, retail media, marketing and loyalty efforts all in one, he says. “We’re looking at how that all works together inside our digital ecosystem as we talk about customer engagement.”
Watts recognizes the massive opportunity that exists today to drive synergies across the teams using the newest technology. “With agentic capabilities and orchestration, we can do some really cool stuff in the near future,” he says, adding that the team is well-positioned to “figure out how to do things better and more effectively for the end result, which is a better customer experience.”
Watts’ team consists of Joanna Crishock, vice president of ad operations and e-commerce merchandising; Megan Galligan, vice president of omnichannel marketing; HanMi Fann, vice president of retail media sales and account management; Melissa Emerich, director of B2B marketing and revenue management; Margit Kittridge, director of ad tech; and Beth Debella, director of data monetization and media measurement.
January 2026’s launch of Edge, the organization’s proprietary retail media advertising platform for use in the U.S., was a highlight achievement this year. “There are very few retail organizations that can say they have truly built their own proprietary ad tech,” Watts notes, naming Amazon and Walmart as other trailblazers in the industry.
Built by their Ahold Delhaize counterparts in Europe, he and his team have modernized it for use in U.S. grocery stores. To take it a step further, the team is currently working on bringing on agentic orchestration to the platform.
“One of the biggest concerns when I talk to people about agentic capability is where our data sits, who has access to it, and who is using our data to train their models,” he says. This way, the organization controls every aspect of its ad tech within its ecosystem, ensuring that they are the only team training their models off of the data.
“That gives us a huge opportunity to advance in the future with little risk of our data ending up someplace we don’t want it, ultimately providing our advertising partners with easier access to true omnichannel campaigns in one user interface,” he says. “We’ll have a level of sophistication inside the platform that creates efficiencies for each individual shopper.”
Looking Ahead
Watts and his team will continue building out the Edge platform to bring all channels together into one single user interface, enabling the retailer to leverage agentic orchestration tooling to deliver easier campaign activation for its partners, while providing a better-connected experience for shoppers.
The team sees the platform as more than just a sponsored search or onsite display platform that powers its digital screens in stores. “It’s really how it can be a connected ecosystem across all channels,” he says.
Watts is also using agentic capabilities to bring channels together and focus not only on the customer journey but where the customer is in that journey. "From those capabilities we can take signals and communicate with the customer based on a 'next best action' approach and consumer preferences on where they like to engage," he says.
“The utopia for marketers for decades has been trying to build a one-to-one relationship with you, the shopper,” he adds. “Can I show you that I know you and deliver the right content, creative and messaging wherever you are in the journey and ultimately lead you down the path of conversion?”
Equally important, he notes, is building the kind of loyalty that brings shoppers back every week. “It’s not science fiction any longer with AI, agentic orchestration and being able to bring these channels together.”
Watts says a key to success going forward will be in leveraging all the rich retailer data that can be mined to connect with shoppers in more meaningful ways, and pairing it with the latest technology to deliver messaging through agentic capabilities.
“Once we achieve both of these, we’ll be able to bring them together to fully leverage the power of communicating with our customers for the highest engagement and conversion rates,” Watts says. He cautions that there will always be a need for human interaction, no matter what else comes along.
“Our work will always require human interaction, collaboration and partnership,” he says. “There will be amazing technology that will help us move faster and take some of the mundane decision-making and tactical work out, but we’ll still have to have strong relationships to keep the business moving forward.”
Watts predicts that in five years we’ll have even more sophisticated tools at our fingertips that will require us to lean harder on building internal and external relationships to keep ourselves sharp and challenging the norms. “And our customers will be looking for more human connections and experiences,” he says, “which could dramatically change how we think about a retail store.”
Bobby Watts
Title: Senior Vice President AD Retail Media, Digital Merchandising and Marketing
Company: Ahold Delhaize USACareer path:
- Ahold Delhaize USA: Senior Vice President AD Retail Media, Digital Merchandising and Marketing (2021-present);
- Peapod Digital Labs: Vice President, Head of E-Commerce Merchandising/AD Retail Media (2019-2023);
- Retail Business Services: Director, A Brands Sourcing (2016-2019);
- Food Lion: Category Manager, Beer/Wine/Tobacco/Spirits (2015-2016); Merchandising Manager (2014-2015);
- Delhaize America: Category Manager, Beverage (2013-2014);
- Food Lion: District Manager (2008-2010).
Industry activities: Ascendant Network; Rethink Retail.
Education: Capella University, Bachelor’s, Business Management and Leadership.
