McCormick CMO Tabata Gomez shares how she restructured her team's workflow to be more 'agile'

Business Insider

Tabata Gomez, McCormick's CMO, talks about restructuring the team's workflow and capitalizing on food trends.

Transcript

00:00People connect with delicious products that are trending and they want to make them Gen

00:04Seers and millennials are all about that.

00:12One of the reasons why I joined my core mix was to help evolve the way we do marketing

00:17to really accelerate sales and drive brand growth.

00:22And in order to do that, I knew we needed to be more agile because we needed to be able

00:27to capitalize on the trends on food that were being out there and to be able to connect

00:32with consumers in a faster way to what was appealing to them.

00:36But in order to do that, we had to restructure a little bit the way we work and create a new

00:41system that would make us much more agile.

00:43In the past, work flowed by different groups and it wasn't fully connected.

00:49And what I wanted to do was create these pods where I would put everybody around the table,

00:53literally, and have them be able to work together faster towards one single goal.

00:59And when they work in sprints, it's a lot easier to get the work done because they hit one thing

01:04and then they move immediately to the other.

01:06And that has allowed us to move very fast, but it also allows us to connect all the different

01:11pieces, whether it's the consumer side of the portfolio or our branded food service side

01:16of the portfolio.

01:17If you think about for our brands like a Cholula brand, we have products we sell in store, we

01:22have products we sell online, we do true commerce.

01:26But on the other hand, we also have table products on restaurant table tops and on the back of

01:31house, in the kitchens, in the cafeterias.

01:35And if we put everybody around the table and work that way, we're actually able to capitalize

01:40and make the most out of that entire ecosystem.

01:42I always get asked what's my favorite McCormick product.

01:46You know, it's like having to choose between all your favorite children.

01:49It's really hard, but I must say I'm very, very loyal to our Cholula green sauce.

01:56It's my favorite.

01:57For the Cholula brand, the number one Mexican hot sauce, when we had planned the campaign

02:02for the launch of 11 new SKUs of mainstream Mexican products, we had chosen to hero a traditional

02:10Cholula SKU as part of the campaign, but we had some really interesting products in the

02:15portfolio.

02:16And what we started seeing is that there was a lot of pick up on Birria on social media

02:22and influencers were talking a lot about it.

02:24We were seeing a lot in restaurant menus.

02:26So we had designed and created a Birria SKU, a simmering sauce that was going to be part

02:31of the campaign.

02:32However, that was not going to be the hero product.

02:35But all of a sudden we started seeing a lot of pick up online.

02:39And one of my team members came to me and said, Hey, what if we did something bold and

02:44different?

02:45What if we actually leveraged the Birria product as the hero SKU of the campaign and launch that

02:51way?

02:52And you know, we were 48 hours before launching for Cinco de Mayo.

02:57And I just looked at the team and I was like, well, if we can make it happen, let's do it.

03:02So Birria was something amazing that was trending.

03:07We led with that and that allowed the brand to win.

03:11We took a lot of events.

03:13We went toop and we were doing work.

03:14We went toop?

03:14We went toop and we've got plenty of people called Richard Luden.

03:16We didn't need battle people in town.

03:17We tried...

03:18To be honest.

03:19We didn't expect to buy money food in a war crew.

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