Our Company has a history of successfully navigating important evolutions.

Over the past 20 years we have dramatically expanded our portfolio, growing from a $200 million business focused on fruit spreads to a multi-category CPG leader generating nearly $8 billion. Recently, we significantly evolved our marketing approach allowing us to deliver breakthrough creative and launching our brands into culture while supporting our ability to attract new consumers. Now, after making progress on our commitments to be in growing categories and build brands consumers love, we are focused on delivering a new, progressive sales strategy.

With our new sales strategy, we are committed to a next level focus on strategic execution. This will be powered by a new organization structure to drive greater agility, a proprietary analytics and AI platform to inform decision making and measurement and a new retail coverage model.  This will be supported with a ruthless focus on in-store and digital shelf execution marked by optimized distribution, merchandizing and pricing.

Here are three areas of focus shaping this transformation.

The most notable change in our transformation is the move to organize our sales team into two units:  human food (our consumer food and coffee categories) and pet food and pet snacks.

This new structure will allow greater focus, support a commitment to deep category expertise, enhance responsiveness to our customers and, ultimately, drive even greater accountability to deliver results.

In particular, we recognize the unique expectations in pet food retail as a large and complex ecosystem where we believe a dedicated Team will enable us to be much stronger partners to our customers.  

There was a time when ecommerce was more of a complementary channel. But in the past year, the impact of ecommerce has probably accelerated five years. Simply put: ecommerce is now commerce. We recognize consumers shop via many channels and what is most important is ensuring a consistent experience that delivers on their expectations in each setting.

Ecommerce sales now represent 11% of our US retail sales. To help us continue to accelerate our support of this critical channel we are folding our ecommerce organization into the broader commercial structure. In addition, we are taking steps to ensure we drive profitable growth in this channel including enhancing assortments and offering unique SKU’s, optimizing our supply chains and extending our marketing efforts.  

Our partnerships with retailers are built on a commitment to drive growth for the categories we participate in. This has been enhanced over the past few years as we have accelerated our work to leverage data and analytics to develop predictive models for planning.

A great example of this is our work around a proprietary technology platform we call the Customer GPS tool which utilizes more than a billion data points to create detailed visualizations to help inform the most effective sales execution – from distribution to shelving. These visualizations offer our retailers a holistic view of their stores and how to optimize them to maximize efficiency and traffic. Customer GPS also enables us to track execution in as close to real time as we can which further drives focus and accountability.

With the competitive categories we participate in, we must maintain a consistent commitment to getting better, to improve each day on how we partner with our customers and deliver for our consumers. The transformation of our sales strategy is an example of this – an exciting one that positions us to build on our strong track record while evolving to support the vision we have for the business.