Picture this: You're managing 200+ brands in the fast-moving consumer goods world, where cultural moments come and go faster than a TikTok trend. Your marketing team is drowning in brand guidelines, product catalogs, and creative briefs while competitors are already capturing the zeitgeist. That was Kraft Heinz's reality—until they served up TasteMaker, an AI platform that's revolutionizing how they create content.

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. But even food giants face the same challenge you do: how to move at the speed of culture without losing brand integrity.

🎬 Watch Kraft Heinz's AI Transformation

See how Kraft Heinz turned creation bottlenecks into content breakthroughs with Google AI and their revolutionary TasteMaker platform.

With brands spanning from Oscar Mayer to Velveeta, Kraft Heinz faced a two-fold nightmare: slow, manual content creation processes and the impossible task of keeping up with rapidly shifting consumer trends while maintaining brand-aligned personalization at scale. Their traditional approach was like trying to catch lightning in a bottle while wearing oven mitts.

Here's where most companies get AI spectacularly wrong: they treat it like a magic wand that works without context. Kraft Heinz took a smarter approach by making their proprietary data the star of the show.

Think of brand intelligence as AI's GPS system—without it, you're just driving fast in the wrong direction. Kraft Heinz consolidated their treasure trove of proprietary data—brand guidelines, product catalogs, photo libraries, and consumer insights—into BigQuery. This wasn't just data storage; it was creating a brain for their AI that understood what makes Velveeta different from Jell-O, ensuring all AI outputs stayed perfectly on-brand.

TasteMaker runs as a secure, prompt-less, web-based AI platform on Google Cloud, leveraging Vertex AI, Gemini, Imagen, and Veo models. But here's the kicker—it's designed for humans, not data scientists.

The multimodal approach means TasteMaker can juggle text, images, video, and audio like a digital Swiss Army knife. Imagen handles text-to-image generation, while Veo creates high-quality videos from text or image prompts. All of this is grounded in Kraft Heinz's brand intelligence, ensuring every output stays on-brand while enabling more realistic, nuanced food visuals for consumer testing.

Kraft Heinz didn't go it alone. They partnered with Apply Digital, a global experience transformation partner that drives AI-powered change and measurable impact across complex, multi-brand ecosystems—exactly what Kraft Heinz needed.

This partnership enabled rapid iteration and scaling, turning a single use case into a comprehensive platform that now serves as the AI platform for all marketing and innovation at Kraft Heinz. Apply Digital's expertise in building and scaling AI solutions helped transform vision into execution.

Most AI initiatives fail not because of technology, but because of adoption. Kraft Heinz cracked this code by making AI feel less like rocket science and more like using your favorite app.

Instead of expecting marketers to become prompt engineers, they built a process-centric, prompt-less interface that guides users through workflows, making AI accessible for non-technical users. The team took an iterative, user-focused approach: they started with a specific marketer's problem, provided regular training, gathered continuous feedback, and optimized workflows based on real user needs. It's like having a personal AI trainer who actually listens to what you need.

Here's where the rubber meets the road—the numbers that transform businesses:

• Content development time: Reduced from 8 weeks to 8 hours (99% reduction)
• Time to value:75% faster for AI-supported processes
• Hours saved:Thousands across R&D, Innovation, and Marketing teams
• Adoption rate:70% among users on the platform
• ROI impact: Enabling high-volume, personalized, on-brand content at scale

These aren't just efficiency gains—they're business transformation metrics. When you can create campaign content in hours instead of weeks, you're not just saving time; you're capturing market opportunities that would have otherwise slipped away. The platform also enables easy integration of new data sources and continuous innovation.

Thomas and his team discovered four key ingredients that every executive should steal:

• Start specific, then scale: "I'd love to tell you we started with some huge ambition to revolutionize everything, but in reality, it started with a specific marketer on a specific team coming to us with a specific problem." Don't boil the ocean—solve one real problem first.
• Ground AI in proprietary data: Your competitive advantage isn't in the AI models—it's in your unique data and how you use it. Make your data the secret sauce.
• Design for adoption, not just functionality: The best AI tool is useless if people won't use it. Make it intuitive, provide training, and iterate based on user feedback. Prioritize user adoption from day one.
• Frame benefits in tangible business metrics: Don't talk about AI capabilities; talk about business outcomes. Speed, cost savings, and quality improvements speak louder than technical specifications.

The key insight? Success comes from making AI accessible to the people who actually need to use it, while ensuring it's grounded in the data that makes your business unique.

🐯 Tiger Takeaway:

The secret sauce isn't the AI technology—it's making it accessible to non-technical users while grounding it in your proprietary data. Start with one specific problem, design for adoption, and let business metrics drive your success story.

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