[4] Sir David has served as Director of The Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales since his appointment in July 2024.
In 1996, after 12 years at the company, Lewis moved to South America to become Marketing Director of River Plate which involved Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
[19] Three years later, in 1999, he moved to Indonesia where he worked as Managing Director of Unilever for the personal care business of the country.
[12] According to Unilever, Lewis managed an average annual growth rate of 30% for the business of personal care of Indonesia.
[7] In 2002, he attended Harvard Business School, where he completed the Advanced Management Programme[9][21] before becoming Senior Vice President for Home and Personal Care of Central and Eastern Europe in 2002.
[12] In 2004, Lewis and his team came up with an unconventional approach called the “Real Beauty” campaign as a marketing strategy for Unilever's Dove brand.
[30] Lewis became CEO after the debacle when it was revealed to the public that Tesco overestimated their profits by £250 million for the year 2014.
[37] Lewis told the board he wanted to leave in 2018 and John Allan, the chairman, said internal candidates were considered but no one was experienced enough.
Xlinks has ambitious plans for its Morocco – UK Power Project, which aims to install massive solar and wind energy farms in the sunny and windy Morocco desert, along with batteries for energy storage, and build massive high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) undersea cables to deliver the power to the UK.
In an interview for the London Evening Standard he revealed that being surrounded by the river and the park in Richmond, where he currently lives, encourages him to stay physically active.
[48] Lewis has been heavily criticized for not responding to calls to improve Tesco's broiler chicken welfare in line with that of KFC, Waitrose, M&S, and Unilever, despite a lengthy campaign by pressure group Open Cages.
The Times released an article in August 2019 featuring a video exposé of birds displaying "serious mobility problems" inside of an intensive Tesco supplier farm, however Lewis has not commented on the matter.
[50] In August 2019, an investigation of the company producing Tesco's own-brand eggs in Malaysia, broken by the New Straits Times, documented similar conditions.