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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. Jeff Hendricks. I am the CCO for Bimbo Bakeries usa, and you are listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
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B
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Set at the intersection of commerce and
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C
tech, your hosts, Sree Rajagopalan and Peter V. S Bhan, explore how brands and
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B
retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I'm your efficacious co host, pvsb, who's also moonlighting as head of client and industry engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. My co host, he's the father of pop stars Rearraj and Cat's Eyes Lara.
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Raj.
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B
Their fans call him, of course, Papa Raj. He's the former CCO at General Mills. He's also the Chief Revenue Officer at Think Blue Consulting. More importantly, he's my ride or die bff. Please join me in welcoming the man known as Sree Sri. Where you been all week?
- [01:03]
D
Oh, boy, Peter, what a long week. February 16th to the 20th, we've been down here at Cagney in Orlando watching CFOs, CEOs, one or two CIOs and CTOs, and then one or two chief brand officers. But for the most part, CEOs and CFOs talk about what 2026 is gonna look like. The outlook for 2027. And I'm talking about the largest brands in the world, right? So on Saturday, at the time of this recording, we'd have already released. At the time of release of this episode, we'd have already released our recap summary of Cagney across, if I were to Count it, Peter, 24 different company summaries. That includes everyone from General Mills, ConAgra, Coca Cola, JBS, Unilever, Mondelez. That list is pretty long, so I won't rattle them all off, but pretty much the largest brands in the world. It's been exhausting, but a ton of learning. 1. I'll leave it with one thing, Peter, that I think is very important to state. AI is actually here. There's a tier A use and a tier B use. And then I'm going to put retail in tier C because I'm in the middle of some projects working with retail. Tier A is using AI already in Innovation M and a daily productivity. Tier B is talking about productivity, but more employee productivity, like HR Tools. Retail is in tier C. Not so sure what to do. But yes, on the supply chain, side, that part was as clear as day.
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B
Here at Cagney, and sri. You and I use the acronym very frequently. But just briefly, can you tell our audience and remind them what is the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference all about?
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D
Yeah, the Consumer Analyst Group of New York is a. I would call it an association that represents all the largest Wall street investors in the world. So this could be from Royal bank of Canada, Citibank, Fidelity, you name it. Every single one of them is here, about 700 of them. And it's an opportunity in this conference where CEOs and CFOs present the outlook. Sometimes, as I mentioned, brand chief brand officers as well. There was a lot of AI discussion this time, so we did have a couple IT folks as well. Then the analysts get to do what they always do at quarterly earnings release, which is ask a bunch of questions about the future. This is slightly different in it's not just financial, it's also about strategy. Whereas the quarterly earnings release are strictly dedicated to financial results. It's been exhausting. But to get to meet a bunch of them, it was absolutely fabulous to talk to CEOs, CFOs, you know, head of R and D. I couldn't agree more. But the one thing you couldn't agree more, sri One thing you did make me miss, Peter, by having me down here in Orlando. The family met with Priyanka Chopra, Jonas and Nick Jonas and their daughter Malti. And I didn't get to do that. I'm still jealous of that. They went to the premiere of a new movie, Bluff. Did I tell you? Ria's.
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B
You got to hang with me, sri. That was what was.
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D
I tell you. Ria's manager, Angela, is also Priyanka Chopra Jonas manager.
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B
Yes, you have. You have.
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C
I will.
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B
I will say this, sri. The thing that was so interesting to me was even though we were way back in the far corner, how many of the investor relations representatives from these big companies came and sought us out, to talk to us? They were reading what we were publishing. We saw them reposting it on LinkedIn. We even had some people calling us during the presentations asking us, what did you think of this? What did you think of that? Because they were presenting later on in the week and they wanted to fine tune. I thought it was Sree. Are we. Are we like corporate influencers at this point? What do you think?
- [04:39]
D
So while I can get carried away with this, the purpose of this podcast is not about Cagney. I know we have a fantastic guest. I can't get started, so let's get on with it. Peter.
- [04:49]
B
Let's do it. Let's do it. Before we get to our guest, let me remind our audience, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform, be it Apple, Spotify, YouTube, whatever. While you are there, please give us a rating. It helps make our podcast more findable by cpg retail industry contemporaries of yours looking for education and entertainment. All right, let's get to our guests. Regular listeners of the CPG guys know that in January we attended quite a number of conferences at the FMI Midwinter Executive Conference in San Diego. We ran in today's guest and asked him if he would join us for an upcoming episode. To our delight, he agreed. Jeff Hendricks has over three decades of experience working in sales roles. Some of the most familiar CPG manufacturers, including Hostess brands, Snyder's, Lance Pfizer and Riviana Foods. In August of 2019, he joined Bimbo Bakeries USA, maker of great brands including Sara Lee Bread, Ballpark Buns, and my family's favorite, Thomas's English Muffins. You know, sri, when I go up to visit mom in Halifax, if I show up without six packages of Thomas's English Muffins, I will be refused at the door. I will be refused at the door. I will be sent back to the States. Say, come back when you've got the muffins.
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A
As it should.
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But in any event, as it should be. In January of 2025, he was promoted to the chief customer office. Let me retrieve me.
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D
Let me just say, yeah, Thomas, English muffins. Take them hot out of an oven, put some good old butter on it. Oh my God. Melts in your mouth.
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B
Sree, I can't have a. I can't have a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich without a Thomas's English Muffin. That is like, that's a requirement. But in any event, please join SRI and me and welcome into the podcast, Jeff Hendricks. Jeff, how you doing, man?
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A
I'm doing great. Thanks for the invitation. I'm glad to have connected with you guys at fmi. I told you earlier and I'll repeat it here for the audience. I've been a an early follower of you guys and congratulations on the great success you guys have really brought to the industry. And Peter, you were talking about real time influencing and presentations at Cagny and just congrats, outstanding job.
- [06:58]
B
Thank you. Thank you. You know, it's interesting, Shereen, I remember seeing you on stage at CES a couple years ago. You were talking about how you were applying Walmart Data Ventures. At the time, I think it was Luminate. It's now called Scintilla that customer data to help influence and improve your out of stock rates. And you were so articulate about how Bimbo was achieving that. Sheree and I were really impressed. We're so glad that we've continued the conversation since then and we're really glad to have you on today.
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A
Now that was a great event and I'll tell you, Seth is terrific. He was a great mentor through that process and I know he's been on your show a couple times. Just the success that he's having there is notable.
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B
I will mention to our audience they should turn to the digital liner notes of this episode where they will find links to Jeff's LinkedIn profile in Bimbo Bakeries USA website. So let's get to our questions. Jeff is chief Customer Officer at Bimbo Bakeries usa. How are you evolving the customer organization to drive both top line growth and profit profitability in today's omnichannel retail environment?
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A
Yeah, I appreciate that. You know we're a food company so we do approach things as a manufacturer perspective, as a brand perspective. And just how do we we change the functionality of the relationships with our customers especially in grocery mass and and club channels. So what we're really trying to do and we talked a little bit about it, food by itself is already specifically bred within food as a DSD model. It's speed to market, it's closer to demand. We have adjustment cycles that we can deploy in a DSD market. So when you start thinking about the digital events, the overlay halo of how are we driving demand through our marketing digital apparatus and then making sure that we have visibility of real time data in terms of inventory, in terms of board supply, in terms of what's going through the register. Each one of those metric components creates a logistic, sort of a logistic logic, if you will, a formula and algorithm. And then how do we use that in an intelligent way to make sure that one of the biggest opportunities that we see in the market from our perspective, other companies talk about why space. We also see the, the miss sales, the lag sales that for years was a missing link right Today with the utilization of customer data that's out there that can identify how many people went online and actually tried to buy your product and how many of those orders were fulfilled and then take that data, feed it back into the supply chain system to say you're either ordering enough, not ordering enough and if we can close the gap on those missed sales, those lost sales, unmet demand, whatever vernacular you want to use, we see that as a huge opportunity to continue to drive growth in our company.
- [10:05]
D
Jeff, what a pleasure to have you on the show. We've been looking forward to this day for a long, long time. Always fun to talk to a fellow chief customer officer. We started getting into data. Data is the backbone of all decision making. Sometimes I wake up every day wishing data based decisions how the world ran, especially in our industry because there's such an abundance of data. With that as the backdrop, tell us more about supply chain. Right. With your background bridging commercial and supply chain, can it go deeper into customer transaction POS data? Maybe retail data. You're getting to reduce out of stocks and improve execution of the shelf which for a DSD company in fresh right at the entrance to the store is everything.
- [10:51]
A
Yeah, we like to say that DSD are the eyes and ears of the shelf. We're there every day. We see the disconnect between what marketing promises and what operation actually delivers in real time. So as we think about that data and how we ingest it, there's been so much work done in that front across the industry, whether it be through API or streaming or how do we bring it in and upstream computations that then feed out to power, BI user interface. All of those things are necessary. Talking points of technicality. But at the end of the day, if you don't have the, if you don't have the, I call it the convergence of the data and quite frankly the key data that matters. What are the key metrics that matter? There's an abundance of data. You can go blind if you don't single out what's going to move my business objective the most. And so we're working really hard sri trying to figure out what are those key metrics that move the needle towards the business outcomes that we're trying to solve for. And then how do we move away from dashboards and manual process to automation? Having conversations with our data in a way that makes the front line, which we're always going to tout, we are always going to be supportive. We have 12,000 routes in the US delivering product to stores daily. They have real time on the ground, intelligence relevant to the market. So we're not looking to displace the value of what we get from the eyes and ears in the front line. But we are trying to use the data from the customers in a way that makes their job easier, that makes them more effective, that helps them make the orders that support the closed loop, end to end sort of value chain of what's forecasted, what's produced, what's delivered to the dc, what's delivered to the store and at what cadence and distribution, timing. All of those things matter because we have the data that tells us by day what scans look like, signals that drive actions, how do we manage route priorities, how do we help them with their orders? That's where a lot of our work and a lot of our focus is.
- [13:18]
D
You know Peter, I gotta say Jeff is the second unicorn in the industry I'm talking to today, or I know of the industry. First one is Bobby Watts. If you guys know Bobby Watts, he's Ahold usa. He was an as above hardcore brick and mortar merchant from a previous life, then went down to do retail media and now has ecom merchandising as well. Can't think of a better person for that role because they bring the full perspective. In your case as a chief customer officer, you're also a marketing expert. Found out today or doctorate in marketing, teaching digital marketing classes. That is one heck of a damn unicorn, Jeff. And, and that means marketing Camp Love. No, nobody in marketing. I'm not talking bimbo in the world. Retail media engines, service providers, they can't mess with you.
- [14:06]
A
Yeah. You are where you spend the most of your time. I spend most of my time with customers and trying to bring end to end solutions. So I, I do listen to those that do it 40, 60 hours a week because I, I make the comment in my teaching too that it's amazing how much I learned from the students as they're writing papers and they're doing their case studies and they're going deep on research. I just, it's a little bit of a hidden secret. I almost learned as much from them as I think they learned from me.
- [14:36]
B
That's great. So speaking of marketing and investments against that, I think if you believe emarketer, at last count There are over 250 retail media networks here in the United States alone. And if you also believe emarketer, you know that they say that most of the investment decisions being made across those 250 are being done by customer teams. It's not being done at a corporate level. And that tells me it falls under people who have roles very similar to yours. Jeff. So I guess my question is this Retail media we know can create a very immediate lift, but there's also some risks. So I guess my question is how do you think about governance and readiness before committing your dollars that you, that you're charged with overseeing to the retail media platforms that your customers are asking you to invest Against.
- [15:29]
A
We talked a bit earlier, Peter, about maybe it was at fmi, how if we don't have that end to end planning advertising into hope, advertising into an out of stock situation is not good. How we handle that, at least here at vemvo, is I've got a great team of senior leadership members with Leslie Besper running our marketing, Joe McCarthy running our sales operations, Lynn DeBlock running our supply chain. And we just have a really strong level of trust among ourselves as a team to get in front of planning and get out far enough in advance so that as we do go to customers, by the time I go to customers, I'm able to more fully commit to say here's what we're going to do, here's what we think the lift is going to be, here's what we want the investment to be, here's what we want for that investment, and here's what we both set as a metric of success that we benchmark against in the post review to determine success or failure in repeat or non repeat. I really do believe retail media is a growth lever, but it can become wasted spending too if you're not planned for it, if the shelf's not supported and it's not executed. So how do you do that? It really is cross functional alignment and that's. Those are easy words to say on a podcast. They're very difficult to really bring together in a real world setting. But I'm fortunate to be surrounded by a great senior leadership team and we're hoping that that, you know, continues to build trust in the market with our customers.
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D
So, Jeff, when digital demand moves faster than replenishment systems, we started to kind of explore that area. Where do you see the biggest execution breakdowns taking place today, especially in a fresh business?
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A
Yeah, as I said earlier, bread's already a pretty fast high velocity in nature by itself. We have quick response time to order adjustment where I think that we see Digital man moving faster than our supply chain. The good news is at least within our industry, we're trying to get closer to market. We're trying to utilize our systems not just in the data that tells us to run faster, but if you don't have the event planning to support that, the whole formula breaks down. And so that's really where we're focused, trying to anticipate greater demand so that we don't have those out of stock situation sree. But it does happen and we have to have to solve for them on a case by case basis.
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B
Yeah, the worst thing that can happen to you is investing in media for products that aren't available at retail. Right. And so solve it. Not only it's not only is it, it's a lost sale but it also it creates an expectation with the consumer that gets disappointed and that's something that you have to deal with well.
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A
And it disappoints us too because my customer, the retailers shoppers get disappointed which is not good for my customers and our consumers who are loyalist to our brands get disappointed. So it hurts on two fronts and we work very hard to mitigate that.
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B
So what customer and supplier data signals have you found matter most to closing the loop between the demand creation and the actual shelf availability?
- [19:10]
A
So first of all the point of sale scan data is really the premise but in and of itself, by itself is not worth anything. So you really have to have a good on hand count. And that's where having 12,000 folks in the field help us. We're not bringing in third party agency to go in on a bi weekly basis to count ghost inventory or we think we can keep a better running inventory of on hands and then we know what's credited, we know what's scanned, we know what's delivered. So we see POS as being the most important because it's the, it's the feed of data that create the metrics. Real time availability. So delivery time cadence, daily load leveling towards demand in the market. So we see real time availability through capturing that inventory position, timely delivery and then promo alignment. Do we have the forecasting, do we have the production, do we have the distribution cadence to support the monies that we're pouring into events whether they be physical events in store or digital events online or preferably digital events online that feed greater lift in store.
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Yeah.
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B
And a follow up to that Jeff, when we have a big natural
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A
act
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B
of God event like the big storm that just raced up the northeast a couple of weeks ago, how do you take those signals to help inform you on what needs to get pushed down to the route drivers to make sure that the product is there before the storm occurs and that they're able to satisfy the demand that they know is going to come?
- [21:02]
A
Yeah, you know and Peter, we saw that too in Covid as well. And if you remember, Bimbo Bakery was one of the top CPG growth companies during that time frame. And I would say we are also during hurricane snowstorms in these acts have gotten because just the nature the speed of our industry in bread we're baking today, selling tomorrow. And when you think about it from that Perspective, we have limited, you know, we have capacity, we, we have the ability to flex more acutely to those, to those opportunities. I don't know that the demand signals at that point really play into the automation of orders or distribution because the spike is so crazy that it's anything we can make really. Capacity becomes the limitation versus the data demand that tells us it. Because if the data could actually tell us, the number would be higher than capacity in some cases. Yeah.
- [22:06]
B
All right, that's a very good insight that a lot of people, I always wonder, yeah, you're walking into a store and they just clean it out. It's not out of rationale, it's just out of over preparedness and panic. But let me remind the audience that today we're speaking with Jeff Hendricks. He is chief customer officer at Bimbo Bakeries usa. Sri, over to you.
- [22:26]
D
So Jeff, back at FMI Midwinter we met up and we started chatting about how joint business plans are totally focused just on an algorithm, a number usually driven by a retail ask. And now the need of the hour in a post Covid era is a joint value creation. You know, joint value creation is two things, you know, putting the consumer at the center of everything, which means driving trips, baskets, the role of a brand in trips and baskets being primary. And the second thing is looking at the full cost to serve, not just a trade rate. So I'm curious, are these discussions coming up and how is it showing up in day to day decisions? Is that where the industry is or we still in a model where it's only about the ask and it's just about a trade rate?
- [23:08]
A
Yeah, we were talking earlier about Cagny and sort of the report outs and you know, the immediate feedback whether it be from the market or shareholders or the street and there's always going to be that cute nature of managing the business in the here and now, which to me is really more business planning as opposed to joint business planning. And we're doing a lot of work, we're starting some work with Krog over at Think Blue and you know, really starting to have conversations that are differently about joint value creation. They happen. I mean I think most customer, most companies that are dealing with customers are having some element of these conversations relevant to, you know, is there a better path to market? Is there a, is there a different way to advertise? If we do X and you can do Y, does that generate value for both of us in cost savings and growth and growth enhancement? So I don't think it's unusual and I don't think we're doing anything totally different than the rest of the, of the market of cpg. But the one thing we are doing is we know who we are. We are a DSD organization fully aligned to supporting our frontline because we believe our customers and our consumers are better served by having that army of distribution in place while we still work on the backside of the creative ways of, you know, building, building marketing signals and measuring click through rates and understanding our MME arms. And so I, I would say from our perspective, the jdc, the JBP approach is really, we know who we are, we're a dsd. Now here's what this means to you as a customer. We are a scan based DSD company as well. So let me try to explain in case some of your audience doesn't understand what that is. There are DSD that do invoice and they'll invoice, some of them will even advance ship notify. Here's what you should have coming, here's what you can expect and it invoices upon delivery. We're a little bit different now. We do do that, but we also do scan based trading which means we carry the product on our truck, we deliver it to your back door as a grocer, we bring it in through your back door. We don't check it in, we put it on the shelf, we fill the shelf. The customer or the shopper comes in later in the day, buys the product or a picker for an online purchase buys the product and that scanned transaction becomes a payable transaction to us. So when you're a retailer and you've got that environment where labor becomes one of your most important metrics to manage, we are a great solution to that because is it's our trucks that make the delivery, not your trucks. There's no cross docking ours, there's no warehouse, no forklifts. We deliver it, we put it on the shelf. There's no labor of merchandising. If it doesn't sell, we buy it back. So there's no unsellable back end of that and you only pay for it after you've sold it. And so there's you know, even an element of cash flow relevant there in terms of the value. We think we have a lot to offer in a joint value creation discussion. And then how do we get creative and overlay sort of the marketing apparatus on top of a strong service apparatus of dsd, bring that together with end to end, closed loop CRM if you will, of execution that, that's the vision. That's where, that's what we're trying to build.
- [26:58]
B
Whenever anyone asks me to define scan based trading, I use a very old term. I just say it's like a consignment shop, right? The person brings in their, their now you have brand new product but they bring in their stuff, they put it in the shop and they only get paid when that product sells off the shelf. And that's exactly how it works. So all right, you were very generous earlier in our conversation recognizing some of the other cross functional leaders in your organization that help you get done the things you need to get done from an operations marketing perspective, what have you. So my question is beyond revenue and share what key performance indicators best reflect whether marketing, sales and supply chain Bimbo Bakeries USA are really working well together?
- [27:47]
A
Yeah, the accretive name, the incremental growth is really what we're focused on. So at the end of the day and we have feisty debates, I recognized our team members as being very supportive. But you know, it's kind of like a family too. We debate out pretty aggressively on are we spending money, did we buy attention efficiently, did we create incremental volume? Was the product available when the consumer showed up for it and did the incremental margin exceed the fully loaded cost? If all four of those are yes, then you know, we feel pretty good about rinse and repeat. If it's not, then we have to go back and sort of break it down a little bit and find out where the, you know, where the leaky bucket or where the hole in the bucket was. I think it's, it's definitely something that we have top of mind as we talk about where do we want to invest, how do we want to invest, do we have the supply chain? We have a lot of confidence in our supply chain because of the DSD nature of our business. But we've got a pretty good, we've got a handle on being pretty quick to market close to market. Can we do better? Data will help us get there but we do think about where we spend the money with our retail media and there's no shortage of retail media in the market and it does have to be on a performance basis of, of allocation.
- [29:17]
D
Jeff no conversation with a senior leader can go without mentioning AI. So I am sorry I've got to go there. It seems these days, especially sitting through, you know, 20 plus presentations that Cagney I heard CEO after CEO talk about AI. Some I think are with the plot and some just had to mention it but we are in a world where some decision making will always be humans. It will require things outside of algorithms and sales expertise extraordinaire to pull off. So I'd love to hear from you. Where do you think AI could actually help guiding algorithms etc and then where must frontline judgment remain? That gut feel, that knowledge of being in store, that deep knowledge like you and I have 30 years in store.
- [30:06]
A
Yeah, it's great. I guess the academic in me is going to come out here because I'm going to throw out a citation. Just got finished reading Jeff woods the AI Driven Leader and one of the clear takeaways for me from that book was AI should recommend not dictate. AI is your strategic partner, you are the strategic decision maker. And I think that's true. I think that's true of senior leaders. I think it's true of corporations as they think about what their overlay of AI is going to be to their legacy or SAP or Oracle system. How are they going to deploy that in a way that doesn't just get eat up with chaos metrics and really goes and is designed to have communication with the data in a way that answers the questions that matter to your question of you know, models are great at predicting patterns and recognition and detection. We are fortunate and I think where we add value to the food industry and our DSD nature is that we do have that front line. The reps are best at the local context on the ground intelligence, executional trade offs. Let me give you an example. I get to a store, I had maybe a worse day yesterday than I thought. I've got 40 units on the shelf, I sell 110 a day and I have 80 on the truck. So I'm going to be a little bit over my demand signal. A I can make the choice to leave it there because I know the foot traffic here is, you know, higher. B what we try to do is make sure that we're building orders directly to store orders so that we're using the data in the effective manner. But they'll know whether or not there's a display coming or whether there's a promotion starting the next week. And maybe they want to build a little bit more inventory into the back room to make sure that they're in better position to address that. There's nuance that AI maybe over time it figures, figures it out but at this point in time we're using it, we're thinking about it in the way to take the robust data that we have, the operational data that we're bringing into our system to create ease of decision making at the front line, to support data driven decision making at the front line. SRI I'd even go as far as to say there's so much in that space when you think of category management and the opportunities that AI will have in the decision making there. It's not unusual to hear buy or sell or transactional, you know, negotiation AI. There's certainly space in terms of supply chain and route optimization to get there faster, more efficient. So it really is endless. No matter if it's your own data or your outside data, syndicated data or customer data, if all parties aren't aligned holistically to the trust of Is that data clean? Did you ingest it properly? Do we both believe the outcome of it? There is an element of AI that I think is going to take a little bit of time to create that trust lever. That AI may say something, but what data is it plug from? What's the data lake source?
- [33:28]
B
So Jeff, I rattled off when I introduced you the number of companies that you'd worked at during your career. So I'm going to consider you to be a credible authority on my next question. What are some of the hardest organizational barriers to making this convergence between the different stakeholders in bringing products to a consumer right? Is it systems? Is it incentives? Is it culture? Is it something else? Where do you see being the real challenges?
- [34:00]
A
Yeah. And so I'll follow your lead on the question across five different organizations that I've worked with and what were winning attributes to some and what I thought were maybe a little more constrained attributes to others. Culture, I think matters more than anything. Having the right culture, a leader led organization I believe is important because it does set sort of the standards, as you think about definition of purpose, definition of mission, definition of what do we rally behind and agree on if you don't have that fundamental, at least for us, we feel like if we don't have that fundamental premise of principles, a litmus, if you will, to filter all other business decisions through. It just becomes harder because A doesn't know what B's doing or there's intersection of dissension and it's really better just to get that alignment. I believe that starts with culture first. Now we can go deeper and then start talking about, okay, do we have the right processes? Are those processes supported by the right systems? Do we have the right tools, if you will. But each one of those are also replaceable or adjustable or upgradable with a good culture of leadership. And so I'm Going to final answer. Culture.
- [35:33]
D
No doubt about it, culture makes a difference. So I get the pleasure of wrapping this conversation up with the last question for this podcast, which is I'm going to ask you to look a little ahead. We call it fast forward. Let's jump into capabilities. What capabilities do you think will separate companies that can compress the response cycles from those that actually cannot? We saw a bunch of that at CAGNI this week.
- [36:00]
A
Yeah, I think that the expectation is growth is getting harder and harder to find. I think I always use corny language like sweeping the corners or I think that interoperability with near real time data deployed against the complete value chain and what metrics simply that are used to extract value at each stage gate of that value chain is where you know there's a hidden gem there in terms of bringing operational and enterprise value. And so I, I would think going forward, data is going to be important. It really is going to be something that helps organizations make better decisions. And if your competition's making better decisions than you are, either as a supplier or a retailer, that's going to put headwind pressure against your business. And so I think really information intelligence. And that's why we're pretty bullish SRI and Peter on our DSD apparatus because we think we have the best of both worlds. We think we can bring a data driven frontline with on the ground intelligence to make the best decision for our customers and for our consumers to get the brands and products that we service them with.
- [37:24]
B
Awesome. That is, that is outstanding. What a great way to end the conversation here. Sri. I know there this was chock full of thoughtfulness, but what was your one big takeaway you want to share with our audience? From our conversation with Jeff.
- [37:39]
D
Fabulous discussion. First of all, I wouldn't have expected anything left less from Jeff, but I want to come back to the top of this conversation. Peter, about data. I think Jeff and I had a little conversation there about data based decision making. Often I feel in our industry, while the data might exist, we have an abundance of data in this industry, very few spot the patterns and very few have the guts to actually act on the foresight. And I think Jeff had a very good thought process of how he works with data within bimbo bakeries, but it's a good learning moment for the industry as well. Right. Simply having an abundance of data isn't going to cut it, but what you do with that data, spotting the patterns but also operationally using it in everyday execution is what's going to make the difference. And I'M going to triple, underscore, bold, italicize the word in execution. What about your speeder?
- [38:34]
B
Yes, Sree, I agree with you on the data. I thought, well, I thought Jeff referenced the fact that, listen, someone's beaten you. They probably have some better data assets than you have and they're able to make better decisions. But I want to, I want to call it something really important. He talked about where AI plays in this AI is there to activate the decisions that humans have made. They're not there to make the decisions for you. That is the best application of AI
- [39:02]
A
is just a tool.
- [39:03]
B
It's a tool. At the end of the day. It's not the Terminator. Right. We're not talking about that future. We are talking about the fact that it's got to be reduce the amount of dreary, drudgery, menial work that humans do as best as possible for. Before we even get to the really sexy stuff of, you know, high end video clips and what have you, how can we, how can we use it to activate and execute the things that human brains have already decided? That was, that was a really big thing for me, Sree. Listen, Jeff, thanks for taking time at the end of the week to join Sreen me for this conversation. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
- [39:45]
A
Hey, real quick, thank you both. It's an honor to be here. And again, congrats on the success. I was super excited, told my wife and I was just, I'm thankful to have been a part of this process.
- [39:57]
B
Well, that's great, Jeff.
- [39:58]
D
You're honored and equally thankful. Jeff.
- [40:00]
B
Jeff, we're going to send you a CPG guys T shirt in the mail so you can, you can rep away. Just think you're. I don't know if you saw. We were, when we were down in Kagan, we just posted the video on our LinkedIn page. We had our friend Nick Modi from RBC. He'd been on five times. He got his CPG guys varsity jacket for five times appearance. So you're four away, Jeff. Just four.
- [40:22]
A
You got some work to do then?
- [40:23]
B
I'm got some work to do.
- [40:24]
A
Peter.
- [40:25]
D
Rumor, rumor has it that he's been showing it off with the analysts and now there are a couple analysts locking us on LinkedIn.
- [40:32]
B
I started getting a lot of LinkedIn requests from analysts.
- [40:35]
A
Everybody wants last cricket.
- [40:37]
B
They want the jacket. They want the jacket. All right, so Jeff, thank you again to our audience of over 42,000 industry professionals who follow us on LinkedIn, engage with the content we're producing. Just thank you for supporting this community we've collectively created. Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube. That's really all we have for you today, and I think it was a lot. We look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the CPT Guys Podcast.
- [41:09]
A
Goodbye.
- [41:21]
C
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