Meet the Canadian exec helping Kraft Heinz make a comeback

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If you want a challenge, try doing what Diana Frost does—excel at a C-suite job at a multinational Fortune 500 company while living full time with two kids in Aurora, Ont. Be prepared for the joys, as Frost experienced the other day, of a one-hour flight from Chicago that turned into an eight-hour ordeal involving three different airlines. Even Frost will admit situations like that aren’t among the pluses of her arrangement with Kraft Heinz, but never mind.

This Toronto-born expert in brands and brand marketing, who got her start with PepsiCo not quite 20 years ago, is having too much fun creating her own brand—as someone who runs toward problems and who’s eager to spark change in hidebound institutions. No wonder Kraft Heinz agreed to her terms when making Frost chief growth officer. The kings of ketchup know a winning ingredient when they see one.

You’ve made a career in consumer packaged goods. What is it about that business that attracts you?

Consumer goods is a very challenging business, and I really love both breaking apart problems and also cultures to be able to put them back together. And I don’t think there’s any better opportunity to do that than within the consumer packaged goods field.

At Mars Wrigley, you were head of portfolio transformation. At Kraft Heinz, you were head of disruption for North America. How did transformation and disruption become your speciality?

I’ve lived off of drive and passion. I’ve lived off of making sure I bring others along. And I’m incredibly curious, so I get challenged by things others don’t think can be done. Whether it’s, “Hey, we’ve got huge complexity end-to-end in our supply chain, with our brands, with the number of SKUs. I don’t think we can clean that up.” Yes we can. Or, “We haven’t innovated within Kraft Heinz in a very, very long time. We don’t have that muscle or gene. How are you gonna spark that?” I’m a big believer that you can always leverage process to solve complex problems. Too many times, particularly at bigger companies, process dictates outcome.

You’re now chief global growth officer. What’s your mandate?

I have three pillars. One is strategy, so I run enterprise strategy. Two is marketing excellence and marketing capability. And three is innovation. So insights and analytics, R&D.

When you think about growth, in all of those areas, is there a philosophy that guides you?

The ability to tie together strategy, marketing and innovation, all under one umbrella, gives you the opportunity to create an engine to drive growth. Sometimes teams get incredibly siloed. The ability to go from consumer insight all the way to execution through R&D, through marketing, to be able to drive that growth—which is something we haven’t proven yet. Yes, we’ve stabilized the business, and yes, we’ve changed, and we are in the midst of a great transformation. But sustainable growth can only come from operating differently. And so having those things under my remit and the ability to touch all of those to create that engine faster is something that was very intentional as we were putting the role together.

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There’s been a lot of talk about a big culture change at Kraft Heinz. What did you find when you arrived?

A culture of ownership, which is fantastic. A culture of meritocracy, which is phenomenal. A lot of passion and drive. But not all rowing in the same direction. The team was going week by week, and month by month, and quarter by quarter, as opposed to long term. And you make very different decisions based on that. So the opportunity that presented itself was to take a longer-term view. One that viewed ownership not in the “I” but in the “We.” This collaborative part of it is huge.

CEO Carlos Abrams-Rivera has said there was an arrogance within the company, that people felt they knew better and resisted people coming in with new ideas.

Oh yes. There was, “Hey, we’ve tried that before, and that doesn’t work.” And there was this view of, “We know better, and the outside can’t make us better.”

Did you meet that resistance?

There were some people who had been there for a long time, who had been through a lot, who were like, “I’m tired of all this change, and how much more change can I actually go through?” So two things were important: understanding the past and showcasing that, actually, change helps people. It helps to come at it from their point of view, versus some people who have come in and tried to bulldoze the change. I think there’s a way to join an organization where you respect and understand the past, while still being bold enough in your ambition to change the future.

How is the culture evolving?

There’s this belief now in what we’re doing. The first piece was falling back in love with our brands. When you look at North America in particular, we’re in 97% of households. And people weren’t celebrating that, nor looking at the responsibility that comes with that. And so the exciting part now is a culture of loving the business we’re in and having a little bit of swagger. We’ve had some great successes over the past couple of years. This year was our biggest ever year in Cannes. We won the creative effectiveness awards. And so the culture’s one now of belief, of ownership—if this were my business and my dollar, would I spend it?—of meritocracy, but doing it as a team. But I think a big, big piece of what’s changed is this belief in who we are.

You once said that Kraft Heinz was known as a bank that sold food. How do you disrupt and force change and innovation at a company like that?

Change only comes with a confrontation of reality, and I think it’s easier to confront reality when the results are what they were back then. I think the second thing is, it doesn’t happen with a wholesale change overnight. It’s getting quick wins and showing that changing is driving results. When we started The Kitchen, the internal agency, we started just sparking with creativity. We started testing around with innovation, and it started getting traction. I’m a firm believer that momentum breeds momentum. Just get going. Do a couple of things that get enough attention and results to say, “We need more of that.”

You referenced The Kitchen. Can you explain what that is?

The Kitchen is our internal social and digital agency, which actually started in the Canadian business. Now we have 11 globally. The way we look at the Kitchen is, it’s our social and digital communities in-house. We did it with the Taylor Swift Seemingly Ranch activation that happened when she was at one of Travis Kelce’s games—that went from a social post to product in Walmart in three weeks. We did it with the ketchup boat guy, the gentleman who was lost at sea and survived on ketchup. It’s how we’re bringing to life all of our brands, but also tying it to social and culture.

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Not long ago, the company initiated a program called Agile at Scale. What’s that?

It’s a couple of things. When you put a cross-functional team on one particular problem for 100% of what they do, the ability to solve that faster through sprints and get to a minimum viable product is so much greater. So, we’ve deployed 36 or 38 pods, putting key cross-functional folks dedicated to particular problems, and running through sprints to get to a minimum viable product faster and, ultimately, to scale it out.

How many people are in a pod?

Depends on the problem you’re looking to solve. If you’re looking at a supply chain transformation, you could have 12-plus people on it. In innovation, eight to 10. It’s making sure you’ve got the right capabilities and expertise. In some cases, a pod will actually have some external partners because they have a capability that we don’t have internally.

Kraft Heinz has been struggling on the revenue front. Sales were down for the first half of this year, and last month the company cut its organic sales forecast for the full year. Why is that happening?

There’s been some headwinds to the industry, no question. What’s facing consumers right now in inflationary times. There’s been some headwinds in away-from-home and food service. We had a couple of one-offs that were more self-inflicted wounds.

Can you cite a couple of one-offs?

You’ve seen the headwinds in Lunchables, post the Consumer Reports. Another one: We had a plant line closure for a couple of weeks that affected our away-from-home business and our ketchup business. I think it’s a combination of those things. What I would say, though, is we are incredibly confident in our strategy. And while we’ve seen some headwinds on the top line, our bottom-line guidance remains very sound.

You made a bet on plant-based foods, a trend that seems to have fizzled. Was it a bad bet?

I don’t believe it was a bad bet at all. I would say plant-based is gonna play a role. I think the piece that the total industry has to take a look at is, yes, you’ve got your vegans. But how many flexitarians will actually flex? And plant-based will scale when the taste, the price and the health follow suit. So, do I think plant-based is a bad bet? No. Is it different in terms of the impact from an industry perspective from what everyone thought it was? Yes, absolutely.

Kraft Heinz used to consider Canada a separate market, but in 2021 you brought Canada into North America. What was the reasoning behind that?

The Canadian business is a jewel of the global Kraft Heinz business, and the Canadian business is doing incredibly well. And we’ll always protect that. But the opportunity to bring the teams together for scale, and the learnings across Philly, Mac and Cheese or Heinz, is vast. And now you’ll see we’ve launched Lunchables in Canada. We’re bringing Taco Bell to Canada. So what I would say is there’s a lot of ways to scale, while also protecting the local jewel of Canada, and using Canada, actually, as a place to test, as well.

What makes Canada a prime testing ground?

I think the ability to move with speed. The diversity of the population. You can test regionally, you can test with different pockets. But this idea that you can try, and if it fails, the impact isn’t astronomical to the overall business, and there’s also this mentality with Canadians, and I can say this very proudly, of being able to wrap your arms around a whole business and see how the dots connect. And the Canadian team embraces that and runs with it.

Speaking of regions, emerging markets are roughly 10% of Kraft Heinz sales, and Abrams-Rivera has talked about focusing on four key emerging markets: Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and China. Why those four?

We have a huge opportunity to scale our global footprint. To get to 25%, 30% in other markets is absolutely critical to our strategy. The biggest part of our global business is in taste elevation, and that’s in sauces. When you look at those particular markets and how they’re growing, when you look at what’s growing within those markets, taste elevation is particularly important. It becomes a very exciting opportunity for us.

So, you’re chief global growth officer. What’s your personal growth story? What are your ambitions?

Right now, I’m very happy with where I am. I’m the mom of two beautiful kids. I’m about to have two step-kids—I’m engaged to be married. I’m working for a multinational Fortune 500 business out of my home country, having the ability to be a part of a transformation that we haven’t seen in this type of business in so long. I’m close to my family—my mom lives here—and I’m able to travel the world and learn and grow. I’m living my dream, I’m living my growth story. I mean, my ambitions are to run a—whether it’s a multinational business or any other type of business—'cause I love being able to see opportunities and drive impact.

Do you see yourself as a CEO?

I do. I would love to be a CEO.

What’s your timeline for that?

There is so much that I want and need to do, to be able to see sustainable growth at Kraft Heinz through this role and the ability to learn from Carlos, and continue to learn from other mentors and CMOs around the business. The first thing I did when I stepped into this role was to call CMOs of multinationals, whether it’s McDonald’s, L’Oreal, Nestlé, PepsiCo, you name it, to learn from the best. I’m humble enough and curious enough to know that I’ve got a lot to learn, while also knowing that getting involved in all aspects of the business is what’s gonna propel me to succeed as a CEO one day.