Danone’s Global Strategic Partnerships Boost Growth
Global food giant Danone's recently announced Partner for Growth programme will identify and develop partnerships with key suppliers and procurement partners to unlock powerful growth opportunities.
The strategy is designed to help drive greater collaboration, innovation and efficiency to realise sustainable growth across the value chain.
The programme is changing how Danone collaborates with its partners by leveraging opportunities driven by consumer trends and insights to foster mutual growth. Danone Manifesto Ventures, the company's corporate venture arm, will also play a role in this transformation by assisting in the introduction of promising emerging brands, concepts, or capabilities to the market.
Danone and Chr. Hansen partnership
An early collaboration in the programme is with key bioscience partner Chr. Hansen. The partnership will let both organisations push boundaries of innovation in the dairy and plant-based categories by using Chr. Hansen’s leading bio-solutions capabilities and leveraging both companies’ extensive culture collections.
“Anticipating and seizing opportunities is at the heart of the Renew Danone strategy, and is what Partner for Growth is all about,” said Vikram Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer at Danone.
“A structured, holistic and mutually-beneficial approach to transform the way we work with partners, to take advantage of short-term opportunities and prepare our brands and categories for sustainable growth in the long-term. It will help us leverage more from our supplier and partner ecosystem to drive shared business growth rather than using a traditional linear approach. It’s how we’ll stay ahead of emerging trends, serve our customers and consumers better and unlock sustainable growth.”
Danone growth strategy: Partner focus areas
• Emerging science and technology Exploring and discovering breakthroughs across ingredients, agriculture, processes and packaging that will shape the future of food to meet consumer needs.
• Precision capacity creation Making its assets more flexible and smarter, combining the right technologies, supply security and global and local partners to better predict and respond to customer needs.
• Cost competitiveness Using digital technology and collective understanding of its end-to-end value chain to drive efficiencies, reduce waste and optimise logistics.
• Sustainability Driving performance and purpose through initiatives that increase the health benefits of Danone’s brands, decarbonise operations across the entire value chain, or help it operate more responsibly with employees, communities and partners.
“Together with suppliers and partners that share our ambition to design and offer superior products to consumers and patients across the world, it is time to step up,” said Isabelle Esser, Chief Research, Innovation, Quality and Food Safety Officer at Danone.
“Through close collaboration with our partners, we can explore new horizons related to product superiority, new technologies in fermentation and decarbonation and find new solutions that benefit us, our partners, consumers and the planet.”
