Kraft Heinz’s Secret Sauce to an Effective Sustainability Strategy: Data

A section where we interview leading sustainability professionals, to share their advice on planning and executing initiatives. This week we were lucky enough to sit down with one of our customers, Kraft Heinz! David Shaw,Global Net Zero Transition Lead and Cristina Kenz, Chief Growth and Sustainability Office share how they are using data to redesign their strategy.

The challenge: unusable data.

The workaround… enter Altruistiq (shameless plug alert). By slicing and dicing data through the lens of business activities, products, and services on the Altruistiq platform… Kraft Heinz can “reformulate the problem” in a way that makes sense to them. Having data visibility at the product-level enables KH to make procurement-informed decisions e.g., ingredient optimisations, supplier swaps etc.

The drive for data visibility (down to every single tomato)

Learnings ripe for the picking:

• Prioritise commercials: Embed sustainability within the commercial team. The closer you align them, the easier it is to get buy-in and budget.
• Make data-driven decisions: Your strategy will be more effective if you understand the full picture. Go deep and granular with your data insight to make your strategic decisions easier.
• Get creative. Know your customer profile and market the sustainability initiatives that will resonate the most. Most of KH’s customers won’t care about cover cropping (incidentally 100% of KH’s farms in Spain implement cover crops). However, KH launched two ingenious campaigns (credit where credit’s due Cristina) to push the soil health narrative to their consumers:-‘Marz Edition Ketchup’: made with tomatoes grown in extreme, Mars-like soil conditions. This was a two year long experimentation which finally resulted in a future-proof tomato variation. To celebrate, a bottle of ‘Mars Edition’ ketchup was launched into space.-‘S.O.S Tomatoes’: KH highjacked the game Fortnite. Players were able to grow tomatoes, however, they were challenged to run faster than the speed of soil degradation to reflect the rapid rate at which soil is degrading.

Feel free to get in touch with David and Cristina - they’re full to the brim with learnings!