Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber recently said the company will invest in a data, tech and agile enabled transformation, leveraging data and technology to strengthen execution, serve people needs.
This accelerated investment plan for 2020-2022 will include €600 million of recurring costs behind brands, technology and capabilities (€200 million in 2020) as well as an accelerated capital expenditure plan of around €1 billion.
It will include on top material other income and expenses’ dedicated to the transformation of our operations, notably in EDP.
“We are going to drive a transformation of our value chain in a way that will allow us to be much more flexible and precise in the way we plan for demand and we meet top-line growth opportunities and cost reduction,” Emmanuel Faber said.
Danone, which has annual sales of €25.3 billion, has completed the digitalization at evian factory. Investment in automation, robotics putting nearly more than 60 AGVs instead of forklift, has allowed Danone to train direct load instead of trucks.
Danone is the world’s third largest bottled water group after Swiss rival Nestle, which owns Perrier, Vittel and San Pellegrino, and Coca-Cola, the owner of Dasani water, according to market research firm Euromonitor.
Investment in a more efficient logistics for evian platform enabled Danone to reduce the loss of materials because there is no accidents, no incidents, no stops anymore and achieved improvement in safety at work.
Danone made investments in the automation at evian and achieved 12 percent increase in the capacity at the factory, reduced carbon footprint and cost of the supply chain and brought evian to being the first site in France ever in this industry to be recognized as a fully carbon — and certified as a fully carbon-neutral production facility.
Danone has digitized Opole, its baby food factory in Poland, and achieved 10 percent cost efficiency, 12 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, 6 percent batch size flexibility.
Danone is planning Capex of €1 billion mainly for setting up a connected end-to-end value chain.
Meanwhile, Nestle CEO Mark Schneider recently said consumer-facing marketing expenses increased by 3.4 percent. Digital spend increased reaching 41 percent of total media spend in 2019.