Challenge

Kraft Heinz is one of the world’s largest food brands, with over 39,000 employees and more than 100 unique brand portfolios. The company was struggling to deliver world-class digital experiences due to reliance on an aging legacy monolith stack, which hindered their ability to attract and engage younger audiences across their digital channels.

To address this, Kraft Heinz aimed to energize how end customers relate to their brands, keep pace with cultural trends, and infuse brand experiences with passion. Justin Thomas, Kraft Heinz’s Head of Digital, reached out to Apply Digital with a broad mandate: design and execute a comprehensive digital transformation to support a fresh approach to consumer connections, driven by greater agility and flexibility in digital marketing operations.

The challenge for Apply Digital was to propose and build MACH solutions that would meet these objectives and address the company's difficulty in capturing first-party data, engaging with consumers, and maximizing business value. It was crucial to ensure that the proposed and implemented composable solutions would meet or exceed consumers’ best-in-class expectations, set by brands such as Sephora, Nike, and Disney.

The business problems were to be solved include:

• How to increase engagement with Kraft Heinz's iconic brands?
• How to attract and retain the attention of younger audiences?
• How to improve first-party data collection, measurement, and analysis capabilities?
• How to leverage said data to derive insights and inform marketing decisions?
• How to create authentic digital experiences that reinforce the bonds between consumers and Kraft Heinz brands?

Strategy

The Kraft Heinz Digital Experience team collaborated with Apply Digital’s Strategy, Content, UX, and Data teams to develop an end-to-end digital strategy. This partnership transformed Kraft Heinz from a legacy tech stack to flexible composable technology, enabling rapid pivoting and scaling.

By working closely with Kraft Heinz, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) was delivered to enable personalized consumer engagement across owned channels. The DXP serves as a single source of truth for over 100 brand portfolios. This platform allows Kraft Heinz marketing teams to leverage agile capabilities and predictive analysis to create, launch, and optimize unique experiences across their ecosystem.

This digital build within the MACH community incorporates over 10 composable technologies, including content management, marketing automation, personalization, and analytics solutions. As a result, Kraft Heinz can now create new consumer experiences within hours and add new brands and products within weeks. These digital experiences are powered by flexible composable components and designed with a mobile-first approach. Features such as animation, video, and parallax enhance the appeal to younger audiences crucial for Kraft Heinz’s growth.

The system provides a unified view of consumer journeys in digital, enabling the delivery of personalized content at every step. KraftHeinz.com has become a data-rich environment for testing and optimizing interactions. This initiative has unified Kraft Heinz’s brands within a single digital space, facilitating global consumer engagement.

Specific areas of composable roll-out include:

• Product Management: Defining a product ecosystem to ensure consistent experiences.
• Marketing Strategy: Enhancing marketing campaigns to engage every consumer.
• Data and Analytics: Transitioning from descriptive to predictive data analysis.
• User Experience: Creating impactful experiences using an atomic design system.
• AI-powered Content Generation: Using AI to generate engaging content, exemplified by Kraft Heinz’s Ai.Oli, an AI-powered recipe generator.
• AI for On-Brand Design: Employing AI Firefly to recreate images of recipes featuring Kraft Heinz’s iconic brands.
• A Gamified and Data-Rich Experience: Developing the What’s Cooking app to help home cooks expand their recipe and skill repertoire.

Method

A MACH-focused architecture was delivered, with Contentful at its core, and supported by a strategic atomic design system to create an ecosystem of connected but differentiated brand-specific sites.

The Kraft Heinz project represents a first-of-its-kind MACH digital build: a composable DXP utilizing over 10 MACH-based technologies, including content management, marketing automation, personalization, and analytics solutions, all integrated into a single stack.

This flexible tech stack enables teams to connect new tools to build imaginative, personalized digital experiences at scale and with speed. Additionally, new workflows emphasizing collaboration and communication have increased content production speeds.