8 hours instead of 8 weeks for new product content development
75% faster time to value for AI-supported processes
Thousands of hours saved by R&D, Innovation, and Marketing
70% adoption rate, enables team productivity and efficiency
With Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz used BigQuery, Vertex AI, Gemini, Imagen, and Veo to supercharge innovation and accelerate new product content development time from 8 weeks to 8 hours, resulting in simplified marketing workflows and faster time to market.
With Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz used BigQuery, Vertex AI, Gemini, Imagen, and Veo to supercharge innovation and accelerate new product content development time from 8 weeks to 8 hours, resulting in simplified marketing workflows and faster time to market.
Accelerating innovation and time to market with a powerful new GenAI platform
If you didn’t grow up singing “I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener,” maybe Lunchables were a midday staple or HP Sauce remains a favorite at dinnertime. Or perhaps you’re a fan of Cool Whip or Jell-O—or both, when combined in a summery chilled dessert. If so, you’re one of the many million consumers of the more than 200 brands of Kraft Heinz products worldwide.
Kraft Heinz fans enjoy exploring the wide variety of tasty foods the company offers, and they want to find the brand and product information they’re looking for, fast. The Kraft Heinz marketing team strives to satisfy that appetite—while showing up as the most creative, consumer-focused food company in the world.
But Kraft Heinz marketers face a two-fold challenge: “Every company is trying to find better ways to connect with consumers—to identify their consumer and what’s important to them,” explains Justin Thomas, Head of Digital Experience and Growth at Kraft Heinz. “And then there’s the speed of culture and figuring out how to keep pace with it effectively.”
Every company is trying to find better ways to connect with consumers — to identify their consumer and what’s important to them.
Justin Thomas
Head of Digital Experience and Growth, The Kraft Heinz Company
To enable Kraft Heinz to reach more people faster, Thomas’ team turned to AI. They focused first on a single use case: transforming and accelerating manual, time-consuming marketing content creation.
Building on their existing Google Cloud environment and working with Google Cloud Partner Apply Digital, Thomas and his team created TasteMaker, a generative AI-powered marketing platform that uses BigQuery, Vertex AI platform, Gemini, Imagen, and Veo to speed product concepting and marketing content development.
Initial results were stunning, with concept production cut from eight weeks to eight hours. “We started our first TasteMaker GenAI pilot less than a year ago with this one use case,” says Thomas. “Since then, we’ve built great internal momentum, advocacy, and adoption.” Today the team sees a 70% rate of adoption among product development and marketing users who are on the TasteMaker platform.
Integrating brand intelligence and focusing on process-centric apps to drive adoption
TasteMaker is a secure, prompt-less, web-based AI platform that runs on Google Cloud, taking advantage of Google Cloud’s inherent security and scalability. Its apps and capabilities are enabled by Vertex AI, Gemini, Imagen, and Veo models.
There were two critical considerations when we built TasteMaker AI. The first was to bring our brand intelligence into the platform. The second was to build capabilities and workflows that would address very specific problems.
Justin Thomas
Head of Digital Experience and Growth, The Kraft Heinz Company
“There were two critical considerations when we built TasteMaker AI,” says Thomas. “The first was to bring our brand intelligence into the platform. The second was to build capabilities and workflows that would address very specific problems.”
With the help of Google partner Apply Digital, Thomas’s team built the first application and then ultimately a suite of applications using Vertex AI. Gemini, Google’s multimodal genAI model, combines a variety of input text, speech, image, video, and music—to create almost any output. Imagen text-to-image models let users generate images from text prompts, while Veo lets them create high-quality video from text or image prompts.
Vertex AI integrates these models with Kraft Heinz’s brand intelligence, a smorgasbord of proprietary data consolidated in BigQuery.
This data includes brand guidelines, product catalog information, photo libraries, and more, to enable a comprehensive set of gen AI capabilities that are always on-brand. “As we bring all of this together, we can efficiently create high-quality, targeted content for our customers,” says Thomas. With this AI, Kraft Heinz’s R&D and marketing teams can test new product concepts in consumer research testing that uses product imagery and launch new products faster , saving tens of thousands of hours to deliver high-volume, personalized, on-brand content.
Deriving new foods, flavors, and formulas from a vast array of data
Data is a core ingredient for Kraft Heinz’s TasteMaker AI. The tool not only creates content based on prompts from marketers—it also provides tailored and specific consumer insights to reinforce innovative decision making with verified data. TasteMaker uses Gemini models, grounded in proprietary data, to evaluate and optimize content to resonate with audiences, bringing marketing expertise to bear on both new and existing content. Thomas and his team use these essential integrations as a catalyst to data-driven, quantifiable decision making.
Taking advantage of the brand assets, consumer insights, and foundational culinary data integrated with TasteMaker, Kraft Heinz teams can quickly generate personalized content for the company’s diverse portfolio of brands. They can then easily tailor marketing materials to specific customer preferences, which helps drive engagement.
The Kraft Heinz R&D and Innovation teams apply the data and insights to product development too. For example, TasteMaker can help innovation teams ideate and iterate on product line extensions, disruptive innovations, and net new market opportunities. And when they’re ready to test new foods and flavors, product content time to market can take as few as eight hours versus the eight weeks required before TasteMaker.
Inspiring adoption, by simplifying marketer’s access to data
As Thomas and his team began exploring the opportunities for using genAI for brand-aligned personalization at scale and accelerated innovation in product design, they deliberately decided not to go big. “I’d love to tell you we started with some huge ambition to revolutionize everything,” says Thomas, “But in reality, it started with a specific marketer on a specific team coming to us with a specific problem.”
When thinking about concepting, ideation, and producing creative or content, the business tends to focus on two variables: time and cost. “With TasteMaker, we’re solving for both,” says Thomas. “We’re enabling people to create as they like without worrying about the process and how long it will take, or cost and procurement.”
Thomas’s team regularly trains new marketing users across the company. “What was clear to us is that, for nontechnical people, AI is still a bit intimidating. So just giving people access doesn’t help address the problem.”
To encourage adoption, Thomas’s team spends a lot of time with their users to understand their needs. Then, with user input and feedback, they optimize TasteMaker and its apps or operational workflows to make using the AI a prompt-less experience for a non-technical person.
That iteration work is fast and easy for Thomas’ team thanks to Google Cloud and its ever-evolving, extensible capabilities. The platform continues to introduce more advanced AI models with better understanding of text prompts to simplify work for marketing users. More realistic, nuanced food visuals make test imagery more appetizing for consumer test participants. Simple processes for tapping into informative, new data sources as they become available further enrich Kraft Heinz’s brand intelligence.
That responsive approach inspires adoption. “Today, TasteMaker is our AI platform for all of marketing and innovation at Kraft Heinz,” says Thomas. “With Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz has a new way to accelerate and augment the power of our creativity, transforming how we bring our iconic brands to life.”
With Google Cloud, Kraft Heinz has a new way to accelerate and augment the power of our creativity, transforming how we bring our iconic brands to life.
Justin Thomas
Head of Digital Experience and Growth, The Kraft Heinz Company
With more than 200 brands, The Kraft Heinz Company is one of the most recognized names in the global consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. A globally trusted producer of delicious foods, The Kraft Heinz Company provides high quality, great taste, and nutrition for all eating occasions, whether at home, in restaurants, or on the go.
Industries: Retail and Consumer Goods
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Gemini, Imagen, Veo, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud partner — Apply Digital
Apply Digital is a global experience transformation partner. The company drives AI-powered change and measurable impact across complex, multi-brand ecosystems.
