Kraft Heinz
Changing the ingredients of L&D
by Kerry LaCoste
When you think of Kraft Heinz, learning and development may not be the first thing that comes to you. However, working directly with the company’s Chief Learning Officer and witnessing a major global food company transition internally toward a continuous learning culture made me reevaluate my notion of the company. I felt very fortunate to be assisting the new CLO and her team as they developed new frameworks and leadership programs to encourage training and learning initiatives. Seeing that type of change mature from initial strategic ideas to company-wide adoption was extraordinary. It forever changed how I view Heinz ketchup and Kraft mac and cheese.
Listening, adapting and responding
My firm’s team played an interesting role in working with The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC). Much of the projects and general work did not follow the usual path of branding and design. A lot of the early work involved helping the CLO try out ideas and strategies she had for effecting company-wide change. These exercises included exploratory graphic and image work with supplied content and not always the certainty of a finished deliverable. It was highly collaborative but also challenging because of the ambiguous finish lines.
This way of working varied notably from what my team and I were used to. At the same time it further shaped our flexibility in how we worked with KHC. The CLO had to consider the micro- and macro-implications of what we were developing. Learning happens in many different ways for employees. Considering those variables created constant opportunities to change and adapt.
Academy website design and development
The main challenge was to come up with an engaging, understandable way to present the academy’s capabilities as well as learning courses that were linked to them. After completing sitemaps and the designs of both sites’ home pages, we shifted to the various capabilities pages. We arrived at a series of pop-up boxes containing a brief description and all related learning courses for each sub-capability. We also had a single course-catalog page including all capabilities and associated courses.
Because these websites were both incredibly packed with content, the end presentation and user experience were vital for employee engagement. The R&D Academy site alone had 20 different capabilities with 65 associated learning courses.
Engagement Marketing
Identity Design
Content Visualization & Design
Executive Leadership Presentations
Corporate Brochures
Infographic Design
Speaker Series
Social Media Marketing
Website Design
Programing
Development
Iconography Design
KHC Leadership Principles
One example of the collaborative effect of our working with the CLO is how their Leadership Principles came to life, as shown on the KHC corporate website on the Purpose, Vision and Values page.
Our project began as an exploration for KHC’s “This is How We WIN” leadership principles. W = Work as a team; I = Inspire excellence; N = Navigate our future. The initial thinking was they wanted a logo of a type of badge to show what the WIN principle stood for. We explored icons for the three letters and graphic applications to enclose them. One solution had a triangular puzzle-piece system; another involved a badge in the iconic Heinz ketchup-label shape with the WIN components inside it.
While we needed to maintain KHC corporate and academy brand guidelines, we still approached the project with the intent of letting it stand on its own. In the end, as you will see on their website, a simplified typographic solution proved to work well within that context.