Many of our competitors compete in one category. Take pickles, for example. If we only buy jars for pickles, we don’t get much leverage with our suppliers. But if we buy jars for 10 different product lines, we can scale. With the enterprise model, we can do more vertical integration in some product lines. We recently acquired Farmer Brothers coffee, for instance. Previously, we’d pack individual pods with coffee we bought from Farmer Brothers, which roasts, grinds, and flavors the beans. Now we’ve moved from buying the beans to owning the entire grow-to-delivery process. We get a lot of scale out of doing that.
What is the IT strategy you’ve developed to drive this new operating model?
Our strategy is to align the IT organization with the overall purpose of the company, which is to engage and delight one customer at a time. Our pillars to drive that mission are leading product platform depth, building a world-class supply chain, cultivating strategic customer partnerships, and creating a value-led, high-performance workforce. The IT strategy delivers capabilities in each of these growth pillars. In leading platform depth, we’re finding ways to bring the companies we acquire, like Farmer Brothers, into our enterprise systems as seamlessly as possible. We’ve never ground coffee ourselves. We need to understand what to do to ensure these product lines run efficiently within the TreeHouse Foods construct.
