Catching up with Rick Brindle, Customer Vice Presidient, E-Sales & Industry Relations, Kraft Foods

This month, CGT Executive Editor Kara Romanow sits down with Rick Brindle, customer vice president of e-sales & industry relations for Kraft Foods. Read on as Rick comments on the past and future of e-commerce and explains why technology has such a big impact in this area. Plus, find out which sports team breaks yet another CG executive's heart.

 

 

What keeps you up at night? Helping people see the potential and connection between new and/or emerging technologies and how they can be an enabler to improved business practices. Many of the practices that are ingrained in our industry today are in some way a reflection of how technology supported business yesterday. This has a great deal to do with the pace of development, the cost of changing and an overall resistance to change. As an industry, we are pretty good at continual improvement. However, we often match the technology solution to the improved practice after the fact. If we could flip that and integrate new and/or emerging technological advances into our thinking before we set out to improve the practice, we could see more dramatic improvement. How can manufacturers and retailers better collaborate? Manufacturers and retailers are in an era of active collaboration -- especially with regard to shopper insights and supply chain optimization. At Kraft, we're focused on building shopper demand through superior customer collaboration. Our ultimate goal is to delight the shopper. To accomplish this, we must first know what the shopper wants, design accordingly then execute with excellence in-store.

 

When it comes to food and beverages, the three areas we know that shoppers are focusing on are: Health and wellness, premium taste and convenience.

 

Further, they must have confidence and trust in the brands they choose. Additionally, Kraft's supply chain strategic platform is built around collaborating and innovating with our customers to accelerate the right technology and best practices globally.

 

 

In that time span, three major factors have shaped the current e-commerce landscape: Broadband usage, demographics and mobility. Sixty-eight percent of online households now use broadband. That is up 28 percent in one year! Also, for the first time ever, more than half of the Internet users are women -- so the use of technology is ever more gender neutral. Finally, to see how prevalent mobile tools are in our society, one simply needs to look around at everyone texting away on their Blackberry, Treo or Motorola Q's. Calling these tools "cell phones" is no longer accurate. On the e-grocery front, it is just as exciting. My team works very closely with our customers pursuing e-commerce strategies as well as e-tailers pursuing grocery strategies. The online grocery segment achieved $5 billion in sales in 2005 and is projected to reach $19 billion by 2010. The segment grew 50 percent from 2003 to 2005. The current players in this space are doing an excellent job delighting their shoppers with robust relationship marketing, honing business models that leverage their particular strengths and managing realistic gross margins and expansion plans. In short, today's online grocers are merchants first and technologists second.

 

 

In the United States, mobile technology is just now hitting its stride. The mobile market is sort of where the broadband market was two or three years ago. Today, you follow the Internet. Over the next few years, it will follow you -- in your pocket or purse. Also, 25 percent of mobile telephones in use are 2.5 to 3.0 gigahertz. This essentially means that they are broadband-enabled. This, coupled with global positioning technology and opt-in marketing practices creates considerable opportunity for our industry in the not to distant future. The Internet and its supporting technologies will continue to evolve at the pace we have come to enjoy. At the end of the day, the end user can now consume information and media on their terms. It is up to us to determine how to get the right information to the right person at the right time by using the right methodology. The next few years will be a fun ride! CG