Rejin Surendran Joins Britannia As Chief Digital And Information Officer
Rejin Surendran joins Britannia Industries as chief digital and information officer, bringing more than 24 years of technology and transformation experience to the biscuit and foods major.
- Role: chief digital and information officer, Britannia Industries
- Effective: designate from 1 September 2026, formally in charge from 1 October 2026
- Succeeds: Susheel Navanale, the current CIO, who retires on 30 September
- Joins from: Wipro Enterprises, where he was global CIO for more than four years
- Education: electrical and electronics engineering at NIT Warangal, and a Master of Management from IIT Bombay
What Rejin Surendran Ran Before Britannia
A global technology organisation spanning 25 countries. At Wipro Enterprises his remit covered digital transformation across consumer care, home care, industrial automation and aerospace, and the work itself ran through SAP S/4HANA migration, cloud transformation, data and analytics, cybersecurity, industrial IoT and automation, alongside Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure strategies and the use of generative AI in analytics.
Before that he was at Coca-Cola as head of digital and ERP centre of excellence for the Bottling Investments Group, leading programmes across sales automation, B2B commerce, data analytics, connected factories and ERP, including moving SAP systems to Microsoft Azure. His longest chapter was 13 years at Unilever, on digital supply chain capability, factory and logistics digitisation, IoT and predictive maintenance, and technology work spanning supply chain planning, procurement and transportation management.
Why The Title Reads CDIO And Not CIO
Because Britannia has merged two agendas that used to sit apart. The company is not replacing a CIO with another CIO: Navanale retires at the end of September and the role Surendran takes on from 1 October puts the digital and information technology agenda under one leadership position.
That change matters more than the acronym. In most large FMCG businesses, IT has historically owned the systems while a separate function owned the consumer-facing digital work, and the two met at budget time. Folding them together only pays off if the person holding the job has actually run both, and Surendran's route through Unilever's supply chain digitisation, Coca-Cola's commerce platforms and a global CIO seat covers exactly that ground. He announced the move himself, saying he was looking forward to working with the Britannia team to accelerate its digital journey. More appointments.
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