General Mills: Transforming food using data, analytics, and AI
About General Mills
General Mills makes food the world loves. The company is guided by its Accelerate strategy to drive shareholder value by boldly building its brands, relentlessly innovating, unleashing its scale, and standing for good.
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About Accenture
Accenture is a professional services company that helps the world’s leading organizations build their digital core and accelerate revenue growth.
General Mills delivered a modernized tech foundation, enabling teams, strategic revenue management, and supply chain digitization while enhancing resiliency and scalability of its data and technology platforms.
Google Cloud results
- Completed 36-month data lake migration in 21 months offering capabilities faster and streamlined data management practices
- Migrated 85% of HQ-based hosted applications from on-premise data center to Google Cloud
- Implemented broad education program across infrastructure engineering and business teams to scale quickly and maximize impact
- Increases the company's enterprise agility by providing single source of truth data and improved analytic capabilities
Optimized supply chain by moving data to BigQuery
With a list of accolades, including the first singing radio ad to creating the first granola bar, General Mills has been a market leader in food for more than 155 years. The company currently operates more than 100 brands in just as many countries, and those numbers continue to grow. To keep up with its own growth goals and continue to make food the world loves, General Mills embarked on a journey to become the leader in digital, data, and analytics in food.
Aiming to be the industry leader in data analytics
General Mills found that its on-premise data and analytic capabilities were limiting its ability to work at the pace it wanted to. The company’s corporate strategy involves growing its analytics capabilities to differentiate itself in the marketplace. To get the deeper analytics the team needed (and to future-proof growing computing demands), General Mills found that the next step in its evolution was going to be rooted in building a new technological foundation that could better support in-depth analytics at scale.
General Mills had outgrown its on-premise data and analytic ecosystem. This resulted in a sub-optimal analytic experience due to performance issues and limited capabilities. The company needed to modernize its underlying foundation, and refresh its approach to data management, data governance, roles, and pipeline processes (discover, ingest, transform, and load). General Mills also wanted to be certain whatever technology it invested in was highly scalable for its own business needs and backed by a trusted company with a reputation for continuous innovation that would be a partner for decades to come. "We didn’t just need a place to store or consume data, we wanted a collaborator that could help us scale the most advanced data management in the industry," said Jaime Montemayor, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at General Mills.
"When we looked at our own road map and at the Google Cloud AI and machine learning road map, we recognized we were moving in the same direction," added Jason Staloch, General Mills’ VP of Digital Core.
"We didn’t just need a place to store or consume data, we wanted a collaborator that could help us scale the most advanced data management in the industry."
—Jaime Montemayor, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, General MillsA new data infrastructure for a new generation of General Mills
Given the enterprise strategy to lead in data and analytics, General Mills first prioritized its data lake migration, dubbed the Cloud Analytic Acceleration Program. General Mills turned to Accenture to help bring the vision to life. "Accenture was a key part of helping us execute our migration strategy," said Staloch. "They already had experience working in Google Cloud and with the broader architecture that we were moving toward. That kind of insight was tremendously helpful."
Once the data lake migration efforts were well underway, the company set its sights on its data center and hosted workloads. The "Cloud Transformation" program's mission was to rationalize the company’s application portfolio before activating a "lift-and-optimize" strategy of the underlying infrastructure on its journey to Google Cloud. General Mills’ goal was to move 85% of the workloads hosted at its world headquarters location in Minneapolis. The remaining 15% were intentionally left on-premise for various reasons.
While migrations were a key outcome, they were not the sole outcome. The Transformation team focused on developing learning and education pathways as well as evolving its infrastructure engineering operating model into squads and platform teams. "Early on, when we encountered challenges, there was a sense of general anxiety across our teams as we figured out terminology, technology, and patterns," said Jennifer Hon, Senior Director of Technology Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at General Mills. "But between the learning agility of our employees, our Google and Accenture teams, we steadily increased our level of expertise. After just a few months, our collective confidence increased tremendously and we were able to knock down challenges as quickly as they popped up."
From a technology perspective, the newly trained team adopted BigQuery as its single enterprise data warehouse to move its workloads. "Having a scalable place to land all our data helps us move quickly and gives us the confidence that as we get more data, we have the tools we need to go fast. To process, analyze, and act on our data to improve and grow the organization," said Rich Rubenstein, VP of Data Analytics at General Mills.
With the foundation of its cloud transformation journey in place in BigQuery, General Mills has been able to scale its analytics capabilities with Google Cloud. The organization is using Vertex AI in combination with Looker and the Apigee API Management to enable its supply chain digitization efforts and improve visibility into financial data. This helps multiple teams make more informed decisions around pricing, price pack architecture, trade relationships, and distribution. For example, General Mills’ major mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures strategy is a business area bolstered by these new analytics capabilities. "As we execute on new M&A activity, we can use Google Cloud to facilitate the integration of new acquisitions into our larger datasets and make clearer decisions about potential deals in the future," said Montemayor.
Delivering more food people love with the power of the cloud
By focusing on building this new foundation for its technical infrastructure, General Mills will be able to reach more customers faster and more efficiently than ever. The company’s transformation programs were originally slated to take nearly three years, but it was able to execute on the plan more than 30% faster in just 21 months with Accenture's support. The data center migration team also partnered with Accenture, leveraging their factory model to accelerate and optimize the migration efforts.
Following the data lake and data center migrations, the last phase involves modernizing internal applications and putting that new technology in the hands of internal champions. "We are pleased with our progress so far. We’re excited to grow beyond hosting on Google Cloud and take advantage of the additional building blocks it offers," said Hon. "For example, with ephemeral infrastructure, we can spin up and tear down cloud assets leveraging infrastructure as code capabilities at a much more rapid pace. We also continue to evolve our usage, taking advantage of new options we didn't have available before." With more flexible infrastructure, technical teams can support the wider business by analyzing, digitizing, and automating parts of processes like supply chain management to help General Mills scale.
"We’re excited to grow beyond hosting on Google Cloud and take advantage of the additional building blocks it offers. For example, with ephemeral infrastructure, we can spin up and tear down cloud assets leveraging infrastructure as code capabilities at a much more rapid pace."
—Jennifer Hon, Senior Director of Technology Strategy and Enterprise Architecture, General MillsAnother fundamental part of this digitization is General Mills’ transition to an API-based infrastructure. "Effectively using APIs can help drastically reduce our time to market," said Montemayor. "With a more connected infrastructure, we can continue to be a more flexible and competitive organization."
As General Mills sets its sights on another 155 years of making foods, the company has set the foundation for a faster, more efficient, and hyper-scaling business. "We’re not at the end of our Google Cloud journey. We're at the beginning," said Staloch.
"And that journey is materializing thanks to the ecosystem of technologies that Google Cloud is building," added Rubenstein. "Between its SaaS partners, Google Cloud generative AI capabilities, and the cloud solutions we’re already using, our jobs keep getting easier, and that's what we expected to see with Google Cloud."
"Effectively using APIs can help drastically reduce our time to market. With a more connected infrastructure, we can continue to be a more flexible and competitive organization."
—Jaime Montemayor, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, General MillsTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About General Mills
General Mills makes food the world loves. The company is guided by its Accelerate strategy to drive shareholder value by boldly building its brands, relentlessly innovating, unleashing its scale, and standing for good.
About Accenture
Accenture is a professional services company that helps the world’s leading organizations build their digital core and accelerate revenue growth.