Kraft Heinz
grassroots learning to achieve global sustainability goals.

For a sneak peek, watch the Sustainability Masters introduction video for Kraft Heinz’s first learner cohort:

Background.

Procurement at Kraft Heinz is a dispersed team of over 400 professionals, responsible for sourcing everything in the Kraft Heinz supply chain, from 25,000 tier one suppliers.

The Procurement Sustainability team, with whom we partnered on this project, are a small but dedicated group of 5 experts, tasked with making Kraft Heinz’s ESG goals a reality, in the procurement space. Needless to say, this was a significant undertaking.

Sponge previously partnered with this team to deliver Procurement-wide digital learning on Sustainability fundamentals, such as Supplier Diversity. However, for 2023, the team approached Sponge with a new priority – to develop a smaller group of Sustainability Masters, skilled and experienced enough to advocate for Procurement Sustainability across their global regions.

Goals.

The goals of Sponge’s partnership with Kraft Heinz, therefore, spanned both the macro and micro scales.

The bigger picture:

• Change global behaviours towards the procurement of goods in a way that aligns to and achieves Kraft Heinz ESG objectives.
• Enable procurement professionals to leverage supplier networks, to achieve sustainability innovations and sustainability excellence throughout the supply chain.

The Sustainability Masters initiative:

Creation of a program to certify an initial cohort of 15 Sustainability Masters and future, annual cohorts.

• Engage procurement experts across the globe with a new, intensive learning programme.
• Develop a range of professional skills to drive sustainability, such as influencing supplier and colleague sustainability practices.
• Enable informed procurement decision making, by building sustainable sourcing expertise.
• Build confidence in the Sustainability Masters through diverse, practical and real-world experiences, social learning and problem solving.

To hear the context and importance of this project from Kraft Heinz’s own Associate Director of Global Procurement Sustainability and Innovation, Brittany Sage Brown, watch the video below:

Our story so far.

To achieve these ambitious goals, Sponge helped the Kraft Heinz team to design and launch a flagship, 6 month long, blended learning programme, for delivery over the course of 2023.

Through our Experience Definition service:

• We helped the Kraft Heinz team to distil their needs and ambitions into a clear set of criteria for this programme of work.
• We identified the skills and knowledge that their Sustainability Masters would need, to arrive at a specific curriculum of learning and skills development objectives for the programme.
• We applied learning science expertise, to define the types of experiences and content that learners would need in this journey, to achieve their development objectives.
• We defined a final learning architecture for the full year 1 programme timeline, incorporating elements such as launch and comms, applicant selection, spaced learning activities and milestones such as kick-off and graduation events.

Our solution engages Kraft Heinz learners with:

• a cohort wide kick-off event and introduction to learners’ sustainability team ‘pods.’
• activities to prepare learners with the necessary knowledge to begin the programme with confidence.
• a core learning section, with digital experiences and resources, this year focusing on net zero, responsible sourcing and sustainable supplier collaboration, to build the knowledge and skills for sustainable procurement mastery.
• an opportunity to experience and apply the theory, first-hand, in a Sustainability Experience week, where learners meet in-person and with external experts from other organisations and academic institutes, to experiment with ideas and be inspired.
• group work on Impact Projects, with the potential to implement real-world changes and sustainability improvements in Kraft Heinz Procurement function.
• a graduation event celebrating learners’ hard work throughout the programme.

Global engagement.

Kraft Heinz has seen fantastic engagement with this fully optional learning programme, with more than 100 employees showing interest (a quarter of their Procurement population) and 56 applicants with endorsement from their managers.