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With a long-standing commitment to shopper-first strategies, Kraft Heinz used retail AI to enhance collaboration, optimize execution, and deliver greater value to its retail partners.
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Industry
As a top-tier CPG manufacturer, Kraft Heinz is focused on delivering value across the board—from brand performance to retail execution. The team leaned into data-driven decision-making to enhance collaboration, bring fresh insights to the table, and better support its customers.
By tapping into AI-based insights for customer analytics, category management, and assortment intelligence, the team strengthened its engagement with a leading retailer, fueling significant impact and meaningfully growing its overall business.
Jessica Keenan
Director of Category Leadership, Kraft Heinz
For the team at Kraft Heinz, a rigorous, data-driven approach meant combining macro-level trends with granular insights at the store, category, and item level. This aimed to give shoppers an experience that balanced value, convenience, and selection.
With a sharp eye on the evolving shopper mindset and uncertain economic environment, research revealed shoppers’ top concerns were inflation and economic uncertainty. Shoppers became more deliberate and disciplined with their grocery spending.
The team dug into trends, perceptions, and behaviors, both on a macro and local level so they could meet shoppers where they were.
For Kraft Heinz, the opportunity wasn’t just about selling more—it was about rethinking how to serve today’s shopper. With retail AI in hand, the team set out to build a more collaborative, insight-driven strategy. From the start, they aligned on shared category goals, mapped clear tactics, and executed with precision—from quick wins to transformative moves.
The end-to-end approach centered on four key steps.
Step 1
Kraft Heinz’ Head of Field Category Leadership challenged the team to redefine the concept of “shopper.” Moving beyond its singular definition, the focus shifted to specific, well-defined groups critical to the retailer’s success. This shift reframed the challenges and allowed the team to start solving for the future.
Step 2
The Kraft Heinz team regularly assessed performance, reclustered shoppers, and surfaced key pain points. Armed with retail AI-powered recommendations, they presented a sharp, data-backed strategy to the retailer’s executive leadership—based on facts, not assumptions.
Step 3
Surface-level trends weren’t enough. The team dug deep into each group’s behavior and patterns. From multicultural families to price-sensitive buyers, curious explorers, and on-the-go shoppers, Kraft Heinz mapped the unique needs, tensions, and decision path that shaped each purchase.
Step 4
The Kraft Heinz team proactively communicated with the retailer, working in lockstep to lay the foundation of its retail AI-informed transformation.
With clearly defined shopper segments and a deep understanding of their needs, Kraft Heinz reimagined what a supplier-retailer relationship could be. Their approach wasn’t just data-driven—it was people-driven, built around delivering the right experience to the right shopper at the right time.
Across an 18-month period, the Kraft Heinz team’s collaboration with the retailer evolved to provide the right assortment and solutions at the right time and for the right shoppers. Through interactive brainstorming sessions and agile execution, they saw clear behavior shifts—shoppers were buying more, and buying more often.
For every segment, Kraft Heinz developed tailored assortments and experiences that drove cross-channel engagement and attracted more shoppers.
Thanks to its disciplined, insight-led approach, Kraft Heinz earned trust across multiple categories. Their recommendations didn’t just support brand growth–they helped the retailer hit key objectives, solidifying Kraft Heinz’s role as a valued partner.
With AI-powered insights from SymphonyAI, Kraft Heinz helped the retailer build a culture of continuous learning and responsiveness. Every decision now centers on the shopper, and both teams move in lockstep to stay ahead of evolving needs.
Even in a landscape shaped by inflation and uncertainty, Kraft Heinz stayed focused on what matters: understanding shopper behavior, delivering value, and strengthening collaboration.
“Trust is very much at the core of the whole shopper-focused approach, and that applies across the entire team, including the retailer, Kraft Heinz, and SymphonyAI. We are all confident in bringing our findings and recommendations to spotlight what we think is the best decision to achieve those goals, and we’re all equally committed to learning together as shopper behaviors evolve so that we jointly gain more experience on more data.”
Chris Conroy
Head of Field Category Leadership, Kraft Heinz
The Kraft Heinz team continues to build on a foundation of trust and collaboration—delivering tailored, compelling recommendations to the retail partner.
With AI-powered momentum, Kraft Heinz is elevating strategic partnerships and setting new benchmarks for shared success.
Industry leaders like Kraft Heinz are redefining collaboration and shopper focus with AI for retail. Backed by decades of retail expertise, SymphonyAI delivers purpose-built AI applications that help brands make smarter decisions from day one.
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