CGT Announces 2016 Business & Technology Award Winners
Consumer Goods Technology (CGT), announced the winners of its annual Business & Technology Leadership Awards during an awards ceremony at the 2016 Consumer Goods Business & Technology Leadership Conference.
The awards recognize consumer goods companies for transformational business and technology initiatives in the areas of supply chain, customer management and mid-market growth.
Nominations in three award categories were collected from the CGT community throughout 2016. These nominations were then narrowed down to a group of five finalists by CGT's editorial staff based on multiple award criteria, like project scope, goals and results realized thus far. This shorter list was then sent to CGT's editorial and research advisory board members, which elected one “winner” in each category.
The following are the Business & Technology Award winners for 2016:
CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AWARD: Kellogg Co. (Bear Naked Custom Granola)
The Customer Management Award is presented to the consumer goods firm that is best leveraging technology or business process change to manage customer relationships, trade promotions, marketing and/or consumer insights.
Bear Naked Custom, working with Avionos, was able to conduct the first successful integration of IBM’s Chef Watson in a consumer-facing website. The results vetted the hypothesis that millennial customers will embrace a consumer food product that offers guided customization and personalized food choices. According to industry research, 88% are interested in trying new foods, and customization and mashups are two of the drivers of this demographic. The company is leveraging CloudCraze, an e-commerce solution that sits on top of Salesforce. Bear Naked is also supporting this project through an integrated marketing approach that includes PR, digital media, experiential marketing, etc., and the response on social media has been great. From this initiative, the company is learning about taste preference, which will help inform the evolution of Bear Naked Custom and its innovation pipeline more broadly.
**Finalists in this category are Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, American Beverage Marketers, Kimberly-Clark Corp and Mondelez International.
SMB MARKET AWARD: Prosperity Organics
The SMB Market Award is presented to the small to mid-sized consumer goods firm that is best utilizing technology or business initiatives to achieve substantial growth in size and/or revenue.
Prosperity Organic Foods, a growing company with the flagship brand MELT Organic based in Boise, ID, is a Bedrock Analytics customer: the upstart MELT competes with big CPG companies at major retailers such as Whole Foods, Safeway and Target. The company came to Bedrock seeking a more efficient and effective solution for managing and analyzing their SPINS and Whole Foods data. Prosperity’s sales and marketing team now gets more value from their time by spending it analyzing data instead of building spreadsheets and reformulating data. Prosperity now has insights at its fingertips, so it just takes minutes to build a report (details on subcategory assortments for MELT and its competing products) instead of hours before. These reports, which the sales team has brought to specific retailer meetings, paint a detailed picture of declining sales for competitors and point to a window of opportunity to revitalize category sales with MELT. Prosperity can also now customize insights to individual retailers without a team of analysts.
**Finalists in this category are Compac Industries, Elli Quark, Moose Toys and Redcat Racing.
DICK CLARK SUPPLY CHAIN AWARD: L’Oral
In honor of the late supply chain visionary Dick Clark, this award is presented to a consumer goods firm for excellence in executing improvements in supply or demand planning, warehouse management, transportation management, S&OP processes or supply chain network design.
The L’Oral Luxe supply chain across the globe plays a double role. It first guarantees proper deployment of the division’s brands (ensures that the same product is available at the same time everywhere around the world). Next it must give consumers a luxury experience: this experience involves exceptional products of course, but also exceptional shopping moments where the point of sale is a theatre that showcases its products, advice, merchandising, testers, samples, etc. In fact, perfect control of point-of-sale execution is the ultimate purpose of the supply chain. The company recently was named the winner of Supply Chain Insights’ Supply Chains to Admire 2016. In 2015, Lora Cecere noted that 50 percent of the L’Oral products were new introductions. The company was pushing growth at a rate of 3 percent to 4 percent. The strategy is to grow in new markets, widen channel distribution (deep trade programs), and build e-commerce channels. As a result, the rhythms and cycles of the supply chain are faster than ever before. For the supply chain leaders, the lines between channels are blurring.
**Finalists in this category are ConAgra Foods, Inc., Haggar Clothing Co., Polaris and USG Corporation.
Congratulations to all of the 2016 finalists and winners. For in-depth coverage on each of these stories, read CGT’s upcoming December issue.
The awards recognize consumer goods companies for transformational business and technology initiatives in the areas of supply chain, customer management and mid-market growth.
Nominations in three award categories were collected from the CGT community throughout 2016. These nominations were then narrowed down to a group of five finalists by CGT's editorial staff based on multiple award criteria, like project scope, goals and results realized thus far. This shorter list was then sent to CGT's editorial and research advisory board members, which elected one “winner” in each category.
The following are the Business & Technology Award winners for 2016:
CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AWARD: Kellogg Co. (Bear Naked Custom Granola)
The Customer Management Award is presented to the consumer goods firm that is best leveraging technology or business process change to manage customer relationships, trade promotions, marketing and/or consumer insights.
Bear Naked Custom, working with Avionos, was able to conduct the first successful integration of IBM’s Chef Watson in a consumer-facing website. The results vetted the hypothesis that millennial customers will embrace a consumer food product that offers guided customization and personalized food choices. According to industry research, 88% are interested in trying new foods, and customization and mashups are two of the drivers of this demographic. The company is leveraging CloudCraze, an e-commerce solution that sits on top of Salesforce. Bear Naked is also supporting this project through an integrated marketing approach that includes PR, digital media, experiential marketing, etc., and the response on social media has been great. From this initiative, the company is learning about taste preference, which will help inform the evolution of Bear Naked Custom and its innovation pipeline more broadly.
**Finalists in this category are Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, American Beverage Marketers, Kimberly-Clark Corp and Mondelez International.
SMB MARKET AWARD: Prosperity Organics
The SMB Market Award is presented to the small to mid-sized consumer goods firm that is best utilizing technology or business initiatives to achieve substantial growth in size and/or revenue.
Prosperity Organic Foods, a growing company with the flagship brand MELT Organic based in Boise, ID, is a Bedrock Analytics customer: the upstart MELT competes with big CPG companies at major retailers such as Whole Foods, Safeway and Target. The company came to Bedrock seeking a more efficient and effective solution for managing and analyzing their SPINS and Whole Foods data. Prosperity’s sales and marketing team now gets more value from their time by spending it analyzing data instead of building spreadsheets and reformulating data. Prosperity now has insights at its fingertips, so it just takes minutes to build a report (details on subcategory assortments for MELT and its competing products) instead of hours before. These reports, which the sales team has brought to specific retailer meetings, paint a detailed picture of declining sales for competitors and point to a window of opportunity to revitalize category sales with MELT. Prosperity can also now customize insights to individual retailers without a team of analysts.
**Finalists in this category are Compac Industries, Elli Quark, Moose Toys and Redcat Racing.
DICK CLARK SUPPLY CHAIN AWARD: L’Oral
In honor of the late supply chain visionary Dick Clark, this award is presented to a consumer goods firm for excellence in executing improvements in supply or demand planning, warehouse management, transportation management, S&OP processes or supply chain network design.
The L’Oral Luxe supply chain across the globe plays a double role. It first guarantees proper deployment of the division’s brands (ensures that the same product is available at the same time everywhere around the world). Next it must give consumers a luxury experience: this experience involves exceptional products of course, but also exceptional shopping moments where the point of sale is a theatre that showcases its products, advice, merchandising, testers, samples, etc. In fact, perfect control of point-of-sale execution is the ultimate purpose of the supply chain. The company recently was named the winner of Supply Chain Insights’ Supply Chains to Admire 2016. In 2015, Lora Cecere noted that 50 percent of the L’Oral products were new introductions. The company was pushing growth at a rate of 3 percent to 4 percent. The strategy is to grow in new markets, widen channel distribution (deep trade programs), and build e-commerce channels. As a result, the rhythms and cycles of the supply chain are faster than ever before. For the supply chain leaders, the lines between channels are blurring.
**Finalists in this category are ConAgra Foods, Inc., Haggar Clothing Co., Polaris and USG Corporation.
Congratulations to all of the 2016 finalists and winners. For in-depth coverage on each of these stories, read CGT’s upcoming December issue.