Caribou Coffee adds four vice presidents in leadership reset

Caribou Coffee just put four functions that touch the cup, the app and the storefront under fresh leadership. The 34-year-old chain named new vice presidents for supply chain, technology, brand and marketing, and market development and real estate as Scott Kennedy pushes a broader reset meant to make the business run cleaner and grow smarter.

The hires are Mike Iannuzzelli, Soumil Deshmukh, Kristen Goldberg and Kyley Yanker. Caribou said the appointments fit a "long-term strategic plan" and were prompted by the company's "organizational realignment late last year." Kennedy said the restructuring created the need for new and elevated executive roles, a clear sign that this was about more than backfilling seats.

The operational logic is easy to see. Iannuzzelli will be responsible for supply chain capabilities and redundancy across all channels, which matters when coffee, dairy, packaging and equipment have to show up on time in hundreds of stores. Deshmukh joined from Sleep Number and brings 25 years in tech, a background that points straight at the parts of the business guests feel most often: mobile ordering, loyalty, app performance and the systems behind in-store execution. Goldberg, who previously worked at Shutterfly and held roles tied to Dunkin', General Mills, Pillsbury, Cheerios and Dunn Bros. Coffee, takes over brand and marketing. Yanker brings QSR development experience from Starbucks, McDonald's, Tim Hortons and Tropical Smoothie, and will oversee market planning, site selection, design and construction.

That mix of hires says Caribou wants both national-scale polish and chain-specific discipline. It also helps explain the timing. Kennedy was named interim CEO on March 3, 2025, after John Butcher stepped down, then got the permanent job on Sept. 2, 2025. Caribou also completed a strategic CPG and foodservice licensing transaction with JDE Peet's on March 26, 2024, moving roasting operations and office coffee and foodservice contracts out of the core picture. In other words, the company has already narrowed its focus. Now it is staffing up around the pieces that affect store-level consistency and growth.

That matters at Caribou's scale. The company said its 2024 annual impact review ended the year with 836 coffeehouses globally, and it said in 2023 that it had more than 300 franchise locations. It also has been testing expansion in Texas, where the Watauga store opened as its first stand-alone coffeehouse in the state and a second location in Grapevine was slated to follow. If this reset works, customers should feel it first in the app, at the drive-thru and in the next store Caribou chooses to build.