Breakthrough transformed the JDE business culture by reaching 3,000 of JDE’s 12,000 employees worldwide, providing them with the capabilities that would be the bedrock of the newly-formed company’s culture of ‘Pride and Performance’.

BUSINESS CASE FOR JDE BUSINESS CULTURE TRANSFORMATION

In 2015, Mondelez International Coffee and D.E. Master Blenders, merged to create the second largest coffee company in the world, Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE).

Having worked with Breakthrough extensively on previous projects, JDE’s then newly appointed CEO, Pierre Laubies, saw the potential Breakthrough could bring to his new team.

Pierre had witnessed Breakthrough’s impact at Campbell’s Soup when it merged with Unilever in 2001 – seeing Breakthrough transform Campbell’s into a double-digit growth business. Breakthrough accelerated Campbell’s operations so significantly that the transition period for its merger’s service agreement was completed within 4 months, instead of the predicted 1 year. Pierre wanted to replicate this Transformation at JDE.

Pierre believed that JDE’s future success would be determined by Breakthrough’s influence and approached us to hear how we could deliver on this.

“OUR CONSUMER DOES NOT BUY WHAT YOU DO BUT WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN” – Pierre Laubies

As with all our consumer-centric businesses, we knew that JDE’s common global values would directly mould the consumer’s perception of the brand. If neglected, they risked implementing discordant procurement and operational systems that would prevent product development from being both responsive to local markets and aligned with the global JDE brand.

JDE commissioned Breakthrough to translate their on-paper values and strategic framework into real actions that would shift operations, grow empathy with the consumer and build resilience in unstable market economies.

JDE Breakthrough Culture

BREAKTHROUGH ACTION

Our Programme of Breakthrough interventions started with the top 50 leadership team from D.E. Master Blender’s. This team established the vision for a fully-integrated JDE. As new leaders from Mondelez joined, the strategy was refined into the company’s ‘Value Creation Plan’ and became the fabric of JDE’s regional and global growth.

Over the course of the integration and for the next 2 years, JDE’s global ‘Value Creation Plan’ (VCP) was spread by more than 30 Breakthrough Programmes that unified the organisation with one common Outcome – to be Champions of Coffee Democracy.

BREAKTHROUGH MODEL

OUR 3 WAVE MODEL

Breakthrough’s 3 Wave model is based on our concept of ‘Critical Mass’. This is the minimum number of participants a company needs to enrol in Breakthrough to ensure our behaviours and ways of working are thoroughly embedded and ultimately sustained as the foundation of their culture.

WAVE 1 – Identifying JDE’s Strategic Pillars for Growth

4 LEADERS INTENSIVES +1 BOOSTER PROGRAMME; TOP 70 GLOBAL LEADERS

Our Leaders Intensives bring together the leaders from all key global functions and regions to unify on the company’s collective growth targets. Each leader interpreted JDE’s Value Creation Plan from their dual perspectives as global leaders and as experts on their local markets. With peer-to-peer collaboraion, each leader contributed to formulating one VCP that was relevant to and unifying of all market regions.

With this, Breakthrough enabled JDE to articulate and declare three strategic pillars that they would use to deliver on their VCP and would be the focus of the global organisation:

  1. Rediscover Growth
  2. Grow Cost Leadership
  3. Generate a Culture of Pride and Performance

Each strategic pillar was used to demonstrate the need for change in a clear, tangible way that would be used to enrol the entire organisation in the company’s 5-year growth plan for operations.

Breakthrough enabled the leadership to seek alignment on these priorities and focus on how they would ensure these pillars and company-wide actions would be communicated and implemented in a relevant way within each Market Unit.

Each global and market leader returned to their businesses with the Tools and concepts that we had used to bring this clarity and alignment, making them responsible for delivering this Transformation.

WAVE 2 – Translating the Global Vision into Local Action

 21 BUSINESS ACTIVATION INTENSIVES; 1,000 ASSOCIATES

On returning to their respective Market Units, the leaders were able to identify where they needed Breakthrough to deliver this future with them.

Breakthrough ran 21 Business Activation Intensives that put the Top 60 from each Market Unit through the same process as the Leaders.

Over the course of these 2-day Intensives, we enabled the top 60 from each Market Unit to generate Value Creation Plans (VCPs) that would quantify the actions and decisions their Market Units would need to take.

Our Wave 2 Intensives enabled participants to address local challenges that would ensure each Market executed JDE’s Global Strategic Growth Pillars. As a result, JDE did not take a one-size-fits-all approach to its Strategy deployment. Instead it responded to individual market demands and consumer needs.

Our Wave 2 Process was particularly effective for JDE when approaching Pillar 1 ‘Rediscover Growth’. Using our concepts, we enabled participants to identify what ‘growth’ meant for each Market Unit and where their most threatening challenges came from. Through open discussion, Market Units found appropriate ways to:

  • Create and respond to new Consumer Segments
  • Innovate categories to fit new food trends (especially the trend for product ‘premiumisation’)
  • Adapt to evolving Supply Chain practises

Breakthrough further enabled each Market Unit to adopt Pillar 2 ‘Cost Leadership’. For example, we used our concept of Mindsets to shift participants out of passive and business-as-usual actions, and start using EBITDA to measure the cost of local operations, so that real emphasis was put on reducing operational cost and raising local ownership of this.

Through this entire process, we built participants’ Pride in their own performance and the performance in their peers, and so ensured Pilllar 3, a Culture of Pride and Performance, was at the heart of all their operations, product decisions and, in turn, consumer experience.

WAVE 3 – EMBEDDING THE PILLARS IN THE WIDER JDE POPULATION

14 TOOLS PROGRAMMES; 2 EXPRESS RUSSIAN PROGRAMMES; 2,000 ASSOCIATES

Our Wave 3 Programmes focus on embedding the core Principles of a Breakthrough culture into every level of the business. For JDE, we provided participants with the Tools to generate consistent resourcefulness as the company built and maintained its Strategic Pillars.

With this, JDE built consistent Market synergies across procurement and operations, such that the organisation thrived, innovating in challenging markets and transferred new Pride for their JDE to their consumers.

BREAKTHROUGH RESULTS

A THOROUGHLY EMBEDDED JDE BUSINESS CULTURE CENTRED ON GROWTH

Breakthrough understands the influence that a leader has on the fortune of their company. With Pierre Laubies at the helm of JDE, their Breakthrough culture grew from strength-to-strength. Pierre role-modelled the behaviour he knew would ensure the business would never suffer from a post-merger decline and lived his vision of making the merger a deal for growth, not reduction.

Results in Growth, Cost Leadership and Pride and Performance could be seen in multiple areas of the business.

PORTFOLIO INNOVATION

As local markets evolved at different rates, there was no standard product that would be JDE’s guaranteed profit pool. Instead, categories with low Gross Profit Margins were becoming more competitive and had a higher growth potential. JDE embraced its new growth-centred Strategy and responded to this challenge by innovating their category portfolios. Examples include:

  • The development and release of at-home aluminium coffee capsules to European supermarkets made JDE one of the first coffee suppliers to respond to the consumer demand for at-home premium products.
  • Partnering with TerraCycle, JDE led the market in providing the recycling capability of both its L’Or ® and Moccona ® coffee capsules.
  • The development of Luxury Tea and Organic Coffee ranges further diversified and elevated JDE’s luxury categories.

MARKET PENETRATION

  • Renewed EEMEA business models ensured resilience in a challenging economy.
  • The successful EEMEA business models enabled JDE to penetrate into these ‘whitespace’ markets for coffee and ensured market-responsive product development.
  • Successful acquisition and integration of Super Group in Asia.

STREAMLINED OPERATIONS

  • The consistent use of cross-market playbooks and transparent communication of their Value Creation Plan ensured operational alignment and increase in their EBITDA margins.
  • A clearly articulated framework for operations enabled associates to take measured, positive risks for product innovation.

CONSUMER SEGMENTS

  • By acquiring and partnering with boutique beverage suppliers and environmentally-friendly supply chain companies, JDE was able to respond to the changing profiles of their core and high-growth consumer segments.

Find out how we achieved great results for our other clients.