Restaurants with three Michelin stars represent the pinnacle of fine dining.
In the UK, The Fat Duck by Heston Blumenthal, Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Core by Clare Smyth and The Waterside Inn in Bray are among the establishments in that illustrious bracket. And next up: the wellness products and services retailer, Holland & Barrett.
Not for its dining experience, of course. But as a metaphor for how the company’s technology team is run.
Holland & Barrett’s chief data officer (CDO), Dobo Radichkov, says it is one way the tech team discusses and shapes strategy. Although not wanting to take credit for the original analogy – one of his colleagues was the first to bring it into internal discussions – Radichkov says his department models itself on a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
“The foundation is the kitchen in the back of the restaurant where you prepare and source – it’s the raw data,” he explains.
“The data warehouse is where you cook the data, make a meal, make it consumable and do something useful with it. But even if you do that, it’s not useful unless it’s served to you – that’s the job of the analyst.”
It’s that “front of house” analyst area where the CDO says he has focused most of his time in 2025, recruiting new faces and bringing the data strategy to life at Holland & Barrett. It marks an important stage on the digital transformation journey the retailer has been on for the past six years, the last four of which with Radichkov at the helm.
Recipe for success
The CDO oversees the central data and analytics organisations within Holland & Barrett, with the task of supporting the business to become more data-driven.
The team is split into four key areas: those working on the data foundations, including data engineering, data warehousing and data lake; an artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics unit comprising analysts embedded into the various business functions; the data science team providing support with machine learning, deep learning, statistical modelling, econometrics and supply chain optimisation-type work; and those looking at emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and automation opportunities.
“We work across all the different departments and our mission is to make data the beating heart and centre of all the decision-making,” Radichkov explains.
“We work across all the different departments and our mission is to make data the beating heart and centre of all the decision-making”
Dobo Radichkov, Holland & Barrett
“I can’t understate how crucial it is to spend the first few years of a transformation building those foundations – the data lake and data warehousing foundation is extremely important because without it, you can’t do AI or analytics.”
The first year-and-a-half of his time at Holland & Barrett was spent doing just that, then last year was about scaling and embedding those capabilities into the business. “The current phase is leveraging the foundation and building on the scale to deliver value to the business,” he adds.
Radichkov says there are four pillars of data strategy in the current phase.
“We’re looking to empower the business with AI to drive productivity and efficiency, but also to improve the quality of outputs and encourage innovation,” he notes.
“Second, it’s analytics. Around 80% of my time this year has been focused on scaling analytics capability, looking to establish a team of 60-plus analysts and getting them embedded in the business functions such as product, digital, commercial, supply chain, operations, marketing and so on.”
The journey to ongoing success at the business, he argues, is in “driving data literacy, data centricity and data-enabled decision-making”.
Pillars three and four are around data governance and customer data activation, which, respectively, involve establishing “how you set the ways of working and ensure things don’t fall apart a few years later”, and utilising the customer behavioural data to create “relevant and enriching” shopping experiences.
Strategy bearing fruit
The wheels were in motion for Holland & Barrett’s digital transformation in the late 2010s, but things got even more serious for the business when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, according to Radichkov.
Legacy systems in place at the time were “the single most limiting factor in our ability to scale this business”, he says, and as the world stayed inside and digital commerce became the first choice for shoppers, it turned into “a business continuity risk because the platform was falling apart”.
“When Covid happened, we couldn’t scale digital efficiently and there was downtime and [other] incidents,” he explains.
Radichkov mentions cloud hosting powerhouse Amazon Web Services, business intelligence tool Metabase, and development platform Retool as key partners today, but Holland & Barrett prefers to build rather than buy in software, to give it more control over its future roadmap.
Holland & Barrett is a rare retailer in that it has built its own point of sale software for its stores. It also developed its H&B&Me mobile app and loyalty platform. It is not afraid to work with third parties when needed, though, and in 2025, it reaches the halfway stage of a three-year tie-up with THG Fulfil, which involves using the tech firm’s e-commerce infrastructure while it builds its own automated distribution centre (DC) in Burton.
Once completed, the Burton DC will include AutoStore technology integrated in partnership with Bastian Solutions, a Toyota Automated Logistics company. This tech stores and retrieves products, in unison with advanced forklifts, order pickers and an intelligent warehouse control system to streamline the process – and it is being embedded to help the company deliver speedier and more reliable online orders.
More closely related to Radichkov’s remit, ChatGPT Enterprise has been rolled out to the retailer’s staff, helping teams work “more efficiently day to day”, while the CDO says AI-powered personalisation is already evident in recommendation algorithms used to tailor communications with consumers.
The data team is creating its own AI models for everything from developing pricing strategies to forecasting and inventory management, which helps improve product sell-through. The team is also working on generative AI-powered chatbots to answer online questions and provide more relevant recommendations to shoppers.
Golden job
At the time of writing, only the retail stores division had more vacant jobs advertised on Holland & Barrett’s career pages than the data team, giving further indication of the organisation’s focus in 2025. And the majority of those roles were for analysts.
“A good analyst is worth their weight in gold,” the CDO explains.
To extract value out of data, you need the analytics expertise – it’s a role that is a bridge between having the data and delivering the value in the business
Dobo Radichkov, Holland & Barrett
“We want full-stack analysts – those with technical and storytelling skills, but also with domain expertise. We want to establish circa 12 squads in analytics – specialising in supply chain, digital, category management, commercial and customer growth – and each role will be a business partner to the function where they are delivering value.”
Radichkov claims the team has done a “good job” in establishing a single customer view, but “awakening the data” to talk to consumers in the way that brings value for both retailer and shopper alike is a priority for the 12 months ahead.
“To extract value out of data, you need the analytics expertise – it’s a role that is a bridge between having the data and delivering the value in the business,” he argues.
There’s already a large tech, engineering, product and data security function at Holland & Barrett, but more expertise is always welcome at the business – especially for a company that likes to build rather than rely on third-party software providers.
“By owning the tech, you can provide much higher value to customers when it comes to the experience in store, online, personalisation, search, checkout and so on,” Radichkov states.
“Ultimately, it’s about unlocking competitive advantage; it’s rarely about cost because you’d probably invest similar amounts if you outsourced. If you’re serious about tech and digital transformation, inevitably you’d prefer to build as much in-house as possible.”
Goley said he preferred to build in-house teams of tech experts, developers and engineers, rather than work with third-party suppliers. It was at that time the seeds were sown for Holland & Barrett’s digital transformation, which has ultimately involved shifting from a business that bought in 80-90% of its tech solutions and systems to one that Radichkov says now builds 80-90% of its tech stack.
Goley, the former CTO at Argos and ex-vice-president of technology at Amazon who left Holland & Barrett in 2021, clearly influenced what is seen today at the wellness retailer.
He said in 2021 that the DNA of every company should be “diffused with people who understand what data is and know how to use it, and are obsessed by it”. His theory was that organisations closest to achieving this model are those that will succeed.
In the latest financial results released by the retailer, for the year ending 30 September 2024, Holland & Barrett reported 10% year-on-year sales growth with revenue increasing from £806.1m to £884.5m. Gross profit jumped to £524.2m, from £475.7m one year before, with the tech transformation strategy cited as a key enabler alongside a modernisation of the store estate and a general brand refresh.
Using AI to help staff self-serve more efficiently is a focus area for the year ahead, as is building agentic AI workflows and data apps to bring process automation “into the 21st century”. According to Radichkov, the organisation will have full cloud infrastructure by the end of 2025, too, with much more data and tech investment to come.
“We don’t compare ourselves to other retailers, we like to compare ourselves to more digitally native, cloud businesses, such as marketplaces or tech-first consumer organisations,” he notes.
“We’re building for digital scale that can get us to ‘100 times’ where we are today – so we build for the long term.”
Read more about retail tech
Multiple forces combining to make the electronic shelf label one of the more sought-after items to add to retailers’ tech stacks.
