🥛 AI, Health & Growth with Danone European President Pablo Perversi | CGF 2025 Interview

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back.

This is omnitalk Retail coming to you live from the Vuzion Group booth at the Consumer Goods Forum here in Amsterdam.

I'm Anne Mazenga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And standing between us, we have the Danone president for the Eurozone, Pablo Perversi.

Pablo, welcome.

And thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

It's a real honor.

It's great to have you.

Oh, go ahead.

No, no, I was just gonna say, you mentioned earlier, I've never had to look up so high.

You're one of the tal people that I've ever interviewed before, and it's such a pleasure.

Thank you.

All right, well, let's start with the big picture, so to speak.

You know, how would you describe Danone's current strategy in Europe?

Particularly, you know, when you think about the global mission?

I want to get this right, of bringing health through food to as many people as possible.

Well, our strategy is our mission, basically.

We.

We set our mission as bringing health through food to as many people as possible.

And that's exactly what we do.

And every day we try to go to more people if it's possible.

And with that, we actually aim to grow volume and continue to perform in a way where the growth is actually coming our way.

Healthy growth, sustainable growth, growth that is actually able to be stepped up over time.

But at the same time, we're transforming the company.

We're making the company into a company that is much more responsive, much more resilient, much more adaptive to the capacities that we need in the market, investing in the things that consumers need for the future, with health being something that is really at the heart of what we do, but also with sustainability being at the heart of what we do.

So we're building all these capabilities in digital as well, which is very exciting as a company with AI at the center of what we're doing as well, making sure that we have the data right so that we're building the ecosystems that are going to be able to give us the AI capabilities into the future.

It's very exciting times at the moment.

Yeah.

Well, I'm curious, Pablo, how are you making it an option for more people?

You talk about trying to get healthier food to more people.

How are you doing things differently at Danone to make that possible, to make that maybe price point more attainable for people?

Maybe new formulations that you're working on so that more people can access the food that you bring to make our world more healthy.

Can you share any examples of things like that?

That you've been working on, I can do.

I think the first thing to say is you want to have strong brands.

Okay.

Our company is on the point of view of brands.

A company that invests in brands, that grows brands, and that has a really good definition of what a brand is, what that Persona is.

With that, then you can actually target consumers through products.

But science plays a really important part in not only configuring products that are superior than your competition or unique in some cases.

Right.

But also in making sure that you can actually bring new consumers into the brand franchise by continuing to add relevance, by continue to add functionality, by making sure that that equation is always multiplying itself to drive penetration.

And with that, you're able to sell more.

And an example of that is Activia.

We had the Activia.

Yeah.

But, hey, you know what we've actually done the probiotics, dailies, and those are for people that want supplements.

And now we got kefir.

And if you want kefir, it's like the turbocharger.

You know, you take one of those and you get many more.

Can't stop drinking it.

Hey, you get all the great bacteria back into your gut.

And if you've gone out for a night with a bit of alcohol and killed all your good bacteria, hey, you can get them back with a kefir.

One shot.

Exactly.

One bottle.

And, you know, science is actually taking us into a space where we can capture more and more consumers all the time through the things that we put into our products.

And that's the way it goes.

Yeah.

Making them more functional sounds.

Absolutely.

It's more functional, but it's also strengthening the brand, and it's a virtuous circle that takes you further.

The idea you're getting at there, food is medicine, we're hearing quite palpably at this conference, and we have been hearing it for the last about a month or so, too.

All right, so products are one thing.

So if I was to put you on the spot a little bit, I'd say products or brands are one piece of the strategy.

But you have to also think about all the channel relationships that you have to manage across Europe, too, and how people are shopping, where they're shopping, whether it's digitally or in store, across different types of retailers, too.

How does that play into the decisions you're making at Danone?

Well, Danone, first say that we have the richest channel footprint that you could ever imagine, because we have.

Not many people know, but we actually do nutrition for health purposes in the medical world as well for people that are recovering from oncological treatments or from frailty or from different needs.

And it's very interesting to see that with that, plus all the other channels that we have and the diversity of business models, we cover probably the richest channel footprint that you might actually have across the whole of fmcg.

And that provides a lot of different solutions for consumers all along the spectrum of their life, all along the journey of whatever they're actually doing.

And it brings much more relevance for our brands because we can be in many, many more touch points than some of the other competitors that we have.

And that's where it becomes really fun, because you don't only grab a consumer in the gondola of a supermarket.

You grab him when he goes to the beach, you grab him when he goes to the gym, you grab him when, you know, even they go into hospital.

Yeah.

Or when they have kids.

And that is actually a competitive advantage that actually sets us apart in really trying to drive that Omni Channel approach, including in digital.

Because I think nowadays everybody is actually going into digital.

And if you look at some of our categories, got 20% of the sales that we're actually doing through some of the digital channels.

Pablo, let's talk a little bit about what's happening more specifically in some of those digital use cases that you gave, especially when we talk about more of the operations and supply chain part of it.

How are you leveraging technology to help improve that and therefore improve everything else down the line?

I love your question because it's really exciting.

It's what we're really trying to do to the next level right now.

And I think everybody's talking to AI.

Not many people are doing great AI, but in reality, getting ready for AI is very, very important.

And I think that we're on a journey with digital.

We're on a journey with digitalizing a lot of the different areas of our company.

We're on a journey to also improve our operations, our planning, our sales, and give capabilities to the salespeople so that they actually become much better enabled and impactful salespeople.

And then on top of this, we can put AI.

And we've started to do some testing on this and some pilots, and the results are absolutely splendid.

They're really encouraging.

Very, very excited about it.

Yeah.

I don't know how much you can share that, but one thing I was thinking about as you were talking before, about the scale of your distribution being a competitive advantage for you.

I have to think AI factors into that in terms of taking advantage of that scale to an even greater degree.

So how are you thinking about that?

Well, the ability to actually have so many touch points is an opportunity to capture data on consumers at every single point.

And if you think that AI is an enabler to evaluate data across all those different touch points, the amount of segmentation that you can do of that data will enable you to get insights that run your business with much more impact.

And that's exactly what we really want to be doing into the future.

Now, it's not easy and it's not a journey that everybody can actually do because it costs quite a lot of money.

You've got to make sure that you're actually doing it in a way that is efficient and with a mindset of return on investment.

And you've got to make sure that all those data points are used in the right way, stored data in the right places.

It's a journey that will take time, but we're really enthusiastic about the opportunities that it brings.

Well, Pawel, let's close with this question.

Of all the things you just talked about, what are you most excited about in the next 12 months at Danone?

What I'm most excited about is I think Danone went through a phase in which the people of Danone did not have the same pride as when Danone was at its best.

Oh, really?

And I'm starting to feel the pride of the people coming back, the energy coming back.

And it's very nice to be leading a team that is actually very excited about what they do, bringing back the results, bringing back the company to growth, bringing back the volume every day.

We've now had six consecutive volume mix wins in a row.

Wow.

And I think this is actually a company that is gaining momentum to take a big leap.

And I think we got to be considered as, you know, one of the places to be and, you know, proof point of that is you get more CVs every day, right?

You get people saying, hey, my son wants to work over there.

And that's the type of stuff which I think gives us a lot of pride and gives us a lot of energy to keep going and keep reinventing ourselves and keep launching new innovation and getting better every day.

What changed, Pablo?

Like, what's in the water?

Or better yet, what's in the yogurt?

Like what?

What's changed that's driven that?

Well, we've got a new CEO that actually came in a little bit before me.

We got a team that is actually a stupendous team working behind everything that we do.

Our sales team is stepping up like there's no tomorrow.

And I really, really like the energy that they put into it.

But you can actually see the capabilities that we're building are starting to be there.

And I think that all of these changes put together is what creates momentum.

I don't think you can actually say that it's one person or one thing or one capability.

It's a lot of different people working together.

Yeah.

And the power of the collective is really making us great.

Right.

And the power of the mission, too.

Yeah, I was going to say power.

The mission is very strong and palpable again right now, given what's going on in the industry as well.

Nobody has a portfolio in the industry where almost 90% of its products are of health star rating healthy.

And this is very, very powerful because you're working to a mission.

That is really true.

Right.

And if you look around, not many people have that type of a portfolio, and probably not the same type of pride when they actually make sure they get one more consumer right.

It's giving purpose to people working in the FMCG space.

That's very unique, I think, still, and probably why you're getting so many of those CVs.

It makes it a little bit easier to do work that you feel purpose driven by.

You can galvanize people around that mission pretty easily, so.

Well, thank you, Pablo.

Yeah.

Thanks for spending time with us today to close us out.

It's getting quiet here at the conference center, but Pablo stuck around with us.

We appreciate his time.

And we'll be back all day tomorrow with more interviews live from the Fusion Group booth at the Consumer Goods Forum.

And until then, Ann, be careful out there.