As technology reshapes convenience retail, Circle K is betting on modernization to power growth, and Janeth Falcon, vice president of information technology at the convenience-store chain owned by Laval, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard, is leading that charge. Technology has moved from being just a back-office to a core strategic enabler essential to the business’s growth, Falcon said.
Falcon, who joined Circle K three years ago, oversees the systems that keep stores running—from point-of-sale and payments to data engineering and workforce management. She said earning trust across departments has been key to positioning technology as a true business partner.
Prior to Circle K, she held leadership roles at Parkland Corp. in Calgary, Alberta. She also held roles at convenience and fuel retailer Puma Energy, Geneva, Switzerland, and its parent company, oil trading firm Trafigura, Singapore, Singapore. Before that, she had an 18-year career at bp, Chicago.
- Alimentation Couche-Tard is No. 2 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
Culture sets Circle K apart, Falcon said. “Everyone you talk to, from the frontline workers to anybody in head office, they love working for Circle K,” she said. “We have four values: Play to win, work as one team, do the right thing for our people and take ownership.”
Falcon applies the same principles of growth to her own development. As technology evolves, Falcon said keeping up with new tools and trends is just as critical as leading transformation within Circle K.
She learns by attending conferences, leveraging LinkedIn, Google and ChatGPT, taking classes and looking for opportunities through tech vendors.
Each of Circle K’s strategic priorities, such as growing in food, fuel and customer experience, has both a business leader and a technology partner who work together to set goals and determine how technology can enable them. Those priorities are then reviewed collectively to sequence projects for the year ahead.
Within the IT organization, Falcon said, there’s also a dedicated focus on modernization and automation, ensuring the right balance between innovation and maintaining the critical foundations of cybersecurity, resiliency and technical debt reduction.
Falcon’s mindset of learning by doing has been tested in real-world projects.
One learning experience that Falcon shared was while implementing a new data platform. She was simultaneously building up the engineering and architecture team. Without a team in place, she didn’t have the in-house capabilities to question challenges they were having with a partner, she said.
“I depended too much on the partner, and they ended up building something that we didn't ask for, and so we had to pivot, find a new partner, and by then, we had built out our team,” Falcon said. “We have our own architects, our own engineers, and now I feel that we're in a better place and can move forward on this project.”
Alimentation Couche-Tard operates in 29 countries and territories, with nearly 17,300 stores, of which approximately 13,200 offer road transportation fuel. Primarily under the Circle K banner, it is one of the largest convenience-store operators in the United States, as well as in Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Belgium and Ireland. It also has a presence in Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hong Kong.
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