Explore KIND’s journey in the cloud with SAP
The Health & Wellness division of Mars Inc., which includes better-for-you snack companies KIND Snacks and Trü Frü, chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to help integrate its new brands. By digitalizing order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report processes in its Trü Frü business, it’s building on this solid foundation to onboard KIND Snacks.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | New York, New York | 822 employees | Accenture |
CIO, KIND Snacks
Unifying disparate systems for healthier reporting and visibility
Better-for-you snack company KIND Snacks operates across 35 countries and functions as a separate business within the Health & Wellness division of Mars Snacking within Mars Inc., the family-owned global food, pet care, and confectionery business. Since day one, KIND’s mission has been to create a kinder and healthier world, one act and one snack at a time. Offering nutrient-dense, simple, and premium ingredients, including whole nuts, seeds, whole grains, and pieces of fruit, KIND’s snacks adhere to a set of nutrition principles, are gluten free, and do not contain genetically engineered ingredients.
KIND’s mission is to create a kinder and healthier world, one act and one snack at a time, with kindness at the core of the brand since day one and the company celebrating and inspiring kindness through acts big and small. This includes serving local communities and combating social injustices to make the world a little kinder.
The acquisition of KIND was part of a broader growth strategy at Mars focused on offering healthier options to satisfy consumers’ growing hunger for healthier eating. The strategy includes introducing more insurgent brands to its Health & Wellness division and allowing them to operate independently, following their own business principles to unlock their potential. Nature’s Bakery and Trü Frü are among the other companies, besides KIND, that have joined the Mars family under this strategy.
Due to this federated and decentralized way of working, it became increasingly challenging for the head office to manage the information flow from these businesses. Disparate systems and processes that were brought into the organization were hindering cohesive reporting across the company’s Health & Wellness division.
CIO, KIND Snacks
Adopting a two-tier architecture model to run core business processes
Since the Health & Wellness division is home to growing, insurgent brands—KIND Snacks, Nature’s Bakery, and Trü Frü—a key challenge was to rethink the decentralized ways of working. It became increasingly challenging for the head office to manage the information flow of these businesses through the disparate systems and processes that were brought into the organization.
The strategic focus was finding a way to enable digital transformation of these brands to simplify business processes and enhance day-to-day operational efficiency while giving the head office more visibility and reporting insights. A two-tier architecture model was explored, using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as the new business foundation for the Health & Wellness division.
Anand Radhakrishnan, CIO at KIND, explains, “When we looked at potential solutions, opting for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition was a no-brainer, as it’s an ideal fit for the two-tier architecture model.”
The Health & Wellness division’s journey on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, in partnership with Accenture, started by introducing the solution to the Trü Frü business as part of a pilot program. Using a greenfield approach, the company moved processes and data from Trü Frü’s legacy systems and adopted best practices supported by SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. In doing so, it modernized order-to-cash, quote-to-pay, and record-to-report processes.
Commenting on the move to the cloud, Radhakrishnan highlights two major factors that contributed to the successful pilot: “First, the business change management was smooth and without any challenges, allowing the company to manage the transition itself. And second, the solution is intuitive and straightforward to manage within the cloud environment supported by SAP.”
CIO, KIND Snacks
Taking kindness and its healthy snacking mantra to the world
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition was successfully rolled out in the Trü Frü business, automating business processes in its finance, sales, and customer service operations.
Through this pilot, KIND perceived the simplicity of deploying the solution for a broader set of users across different functions, providing the technology platform it needed to support its mission. This includes fulfilling its quest to add more than two billion servings of nutrient-dense foods to people’s diets and source 100% of its almonds from bee-friendly farms by 2025.
Radhakrishnan comments, “For KIND, the route to market on a global level is going to be very important for our growth. At the same time, there are several trends happening in the permissible snacking category where we want to be an attractive option for founder-led brands to become part of the Mars family. The adoption of advanced ERP in the public cloud and digitalization of order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report processes gives us a strong foundation to replicate our success in North America across the world. Simplifying integration with third-party applications will be critical to success.”
CIO, KIND Snacks
Innovating faster with analytics and AI
By using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as its business technology foundation while partnering with implementation experts from Accenture, KIND expects to see significant operational efficiencies across the organization. It also plans to maximize the use of analytics. “Better analytics and richer insights are going to be key differentiators for us as a smaller organization, and we expect them to have a tremendous multiplier effect,” says Radhakrishnan.
The Health & Wellness division has also embarked on a data-led AI journey, and Radhakrishnan believes supervised AI will be instrumental in automating business processes and enabling them to be performed much more efficiently. “Humans make around 35,000 decisions per day. If I could support that decision-making with an AI engine for pricing and promotion analytics or category management, it could play a key role in launching our next innovative product.”
Featured partner
Accenture is a global professional services company that helps leading businesses, governments, and other organizations build and optimize their digital operations, accelerate revenue growth, and enhance citizen services. For the Health & Wellness division of Mars Inc., Accenture guided the implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as part of a pilot program at Trü Frü.