🥗 Kerry’s Juan Aguiriano on Redesigning Food Systems with AI & Impact | CGF 2025 🌍
In this final CGF 2025 interview recorded live from the VusionGroup Podcast Studio, Juan Aguiriano, Group Head of Sustainability at Kerry Group, joins Omni Talk Retail to share how Kerry is helping transform global food systems.
Juan kicks off with what energized him most at the event (0:30) and details a not-so-secret breakfast meeting of CSOs including Ahold’s Alex Holt (1:00). He outlines Kerry’s innovation-with-impact strategy—cutting food waste with shelf-life tech (2:30), reducing sugar and salt while preserving taste (3:30), and scaling biotech platforms like fermentation and enzymes (4:30). He then dives into Kerry’s use of AI for food concept development (5:30), combining chef creativity with data to digitally prototype sustainable products (6:30). Juan closes with a look at carbon tracking, hybrid dairy, and how digital platforms help Kerry measure its footprint across 22,000+ products (9:00), making better food and a better planet achievable—at scale.
#KerryGroup #foodinnovation #sustainablenutrition #cgf2025 #JuanAguiriano #omnitalkretail #AIinFood #HybridDairy #foodwaste #CarbonTracking
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Transcript
Hello, welcome back.
Speaker A:This is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Anne Mazinga.
Speaker B:And I'm Chris Walton.
Speaker A:And we are coming to you for our last interview from the Consumer Goods Forum in Amsterdam in the Vusion Group booth.
Speaker A:And between Chris and I, we have Juan Agriano, the group head of sustainability at Cary.
Speaker A:Juan, welcome.
Speaker C:Hello.
Speaker C:How are you?
Speaker A:I'm doing great.
Speaker A:How are you?
Speaker C:Great.
Speaker A:You've survived three days at the consumer goods floor.
Speaker C:I loved it.
Speaker C:This gives me a lot of energy.
Speaker C:You meet fantastic people.
Speaker C:The panels are great.
Speaker C:Lots of insights.
Speaker C:Innovation, sustainability, AI.
Speaker C:Very good.
Speaker A:I was joking with one of actually Alex Holt from Ahold Delhez yesterday and I said, do you.
Speaker A:Are you all you chief sustainability officers?
Speaker A:Do you have some sort of like secret chat or anything?
Speaker A:You guys have like a coalition here when you get together?
Speaker C:We.
Speaker C:I'm not sure if it's secret, but Alex invited us and we got together for breakfast.
Speaker C:Did you?
Speaker A:Oh.
Speaker A:So she.
Speaker C:We did, we did, we did.
Speaker C:20, 25 of us.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker C:And we chatted.
Speaker C:What's going well?
Speaker C:What's not going so well?
Speaker C:Yeah, sharing a little bit of best practice.
Speaker A:That's really cool.
Speaker C:Not secret, but very insightful, very nice.
Speaker A:You just have to be a sustainability officer to get in the door.
Speaker A:That's the password.
Speaker C:The password is having something to do with sustainability.
Speaker B:Nice, nice.
Speaker B:Well, let's talk about that.
Speaker B:So we've talked a lot about this at this conference already, about the need to transform the global food system.
Speaker B:What do you think are the most urgent priorities when it comes to that endeavor?
Speaker B:And where do you think companies like Cary can make the most difference?
Speaker C:Look, the issues are well known.
Speaker C:We're talking about food waste, circular climate, nature, and most importantly, nutrition and health.
Speaker C:So the food needs to be nutritional.
Speaker C:It needs to be done in a way that preserves and grows the health of consumers, but it also needs to preserve the health of the planet.
Speaker C:So at the high level, it's quite simple.
Speaker C:Now, doing that is challenging.
Speaker C:And so in Kerry, what we focus on is innovation with impact.
Speaker C:So we help our customers to literally save the planet.
Speaker C:We one meal and one dish at a time.
Speaker C:Okay, so what we do is we help improve the nutritional content of the food.
Speaker C:We reduce the carbon content, we avoid deforestation, we make sure that there is biodiversity, etc.
Speaker C:How do we do that?
Speaker C:Well, for instance, we have solutions that continue to preserve the food longer.
Speaker C:Okay, so this is done with clean label solutions.
Speaker C:And as you extend the shelf life of the food, you have more time to manufacture the food, you have more Time to sell the food and you have more time to consume the food.
Speaker C:And that reduces food waste.
Speaker C:And food waste is everything.
Speaker C:It's economic loss, it's climate loss, it's biodiversity loss, etc.
Speaker C:So since 30 to 40% of the food is never consumed, that's the first thing we do, make sure that we reduce food waste.
Speaker C:Then the second thing we do is reduce the big things that you need to live, but too much of it kills you.
Speaker C:Too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat.
Speaker C:So we have solutions to reduce that while maintaining taste, function and cost.
Speaker C:You can't compromise on anything.
Speaker C:The consumer wants it all, the brands want it all.
Speaker C:So this is an end equation.
Speaker C:It's not sustainability or cost.
Speaker C:We need to do sustainable nutrition at cost.
Speaker C:It needs to be affordable, it needs to be available, it needs to be super tasty, it needs to be nutritional, and then we reduce carbon, water, etc.
Speaker A:Well, Juan, outside of like the actual technology that you're using to create food in that way, what kind of operational systems are changing or technologies are you investing in so that you can do the things you talk about, make sustainable, high quality, healthy food available at scale?
Speaker A:What tech do you look at at Carrie to do that?
Speaker C:Yeah, the underlying platform are biotechnology.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:It's a big term.
Speaker C:So what is that?
Speaker C:You take things like fermentation that's existed for 5,000 years, and you turbocharged that with modern micro microbes if you want, or type enzymes, probiotics, prebiotics, yeast, fermenting agents, etc.
Speaker C:So that's one sense.
Speaker C:And with that you can create taste, you can create new proteins, you can create new actives that are healthier, etc.
Speaker C:So that's the foundation platform.
Speaker C:And then the impact you can have with that is then you can reduce sugar, but you can also reduce cocoa, reduce coffee, reduce dairy, reduce egg without impacting the taste and having this real benefit on cost and sustainability.
Speaker C:So it's very smart technology, but it's very natural.
Speaker A:What about in terms of things like on the planning side?
Speaker A:Is there technology that you're using at Cary to help plan better or forecast how much food you're going to need?
Speaker A:Or are you using AI in any ways to kind of help the teams that are working on those things to kind of consolidate processes on the business side of it, not the, the food production side of it?
Speaker C:So we use AI in two ways.
Speaker C:One is efficiency.
Speaker C:So the efficiency is what a lot of companies are already doing.
Speaker C:It's better planning, better forecasting, better processes.
Speaker C:So using data to make smarter, better decisions on the day to day process.
Speaker C:So it's a cost reduction, but more exciting is the innovation.
Speaker C:How do we use.
Speaker C:We do a lot of market research on consumers.
Speaker C:Yeah, we do a lot of product market research and we have a lot of technology.
Speaker C:So we put all of that into AI and what we do is developing better concepts digitally for our customers.
Speaker C:So remember, we are a technology house, so we do not produce finished products, what we do, but we do produce prototypes of finished products.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker C:So we have, we mix the craft of 80 or 100 chefs who are Michelin stars level with the science of technology and the data of AI to create prototypes.
Speaker C:So we have a very cool application that proposes, okay, if you're in the snack category in a given country with a, addressing a given generation, etc.
Speaker C:You analyze all these trends and then you can propose, okay, these would probably be the top three sellers.
Speaker C:And you put the requirements, it needs to have 30% less salt.
Speaker C:It needs to be tasting so cool tasting barbecue.
Speaker C:And it needs to have a little bit of a extra cheese flavor or whatever you want.
Speaker C:And it says, okay, these are the top potential, three top sellers.
Speaker C:This is what it would look like.
Speaker C:It's digital.
Speaker C:And then, then you go and do the prototype physically.
Speaker C:Yeah, but doing it first digitally cuts a lot of time.
Speaker C:It's much faster.
Speaker C:No, and then you say, can you tweak here and here and here?
Speaker C:You can tweak anything you want in five minutes, Right.
Speaker C:And then you do physically what you need to do.
Speaker B:So better products, better formulations, that's essentially what you're trying to do.
Speaker C:And better impact, I would say, I would say, if you don't mind.
Speaker C:Yeah, no, please, if you can design it.
Speaker C:Impact.
Speaker B:Yeah, right.
Speaker C:You say, this is what I need.
Speaker B:Design it to the criteria.
Speaker C:And then.
Speaker C:Okay, this is what the category would look like.
Speaker C:Sorry, the product in the category would look like and the benefits.
Speaker C:And then you go, okay, what are the features I need inside?
Speaker C:So you go, impact back.
Speaker A:Got it, got it.
Speaker B:Is that what you want too?
Speaker B:Do you want better cheese in your products?
Speaker B:Is that a want thing or is that just what came to the top of the road?
Speaker C:No, cheese is an example.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Dairy is fantastic product, but as we know, it's challenge in terms of greenhouse gases, water, fertilizers, all kind of things.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:So Kerry has invested historically in becoming a very sustainable dairy producer.
Speaker C:It's only 10, 15% of our business, but we were recognized recently as by SAI under the sdf, sorry, for the acronym Sustainable Sustainable Dairy Framework, we're the first company to get that stage fee, stage five, sorry, globally on that.
Speaker C:Which means we can track the footprint of our milk physically.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Then you convert that into ingredients and you put that into products.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And that what we're doing is so the foundation of the dairy is the most sustainable possible.
Speaker C:But now we're going to do.
Speaker C:Okay, can we do hybrids, dairy and oats?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So you do that and you get all the benefit of taste of dairy, you get all the nutritionals of dairy.
Speaker C:You also get all the nutritionals of plants.
Speaker C:You get from dairy you get the good proteins and from plants you get the fibers and then you have half of the CO2 footprint.
Speaker C:So it's not plant or dairy, it's hybrids.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right, Right.
Speaker B:Well, let's get you out of here on this then.
Speaker B:So one of the questions we asked Alex hold yesterday, your counterpart at AH hold was around, how do you.
Speaker B:And you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but let's dig into it more.
Speaker B:How do you, how do you measure it?
Speaker B:How do you know that you're making progress towards real concrete goals day in and day out in your job?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So I gave you another example and I'll tell you how we did it.
Speaker C:Yesterday we presented a solution for orange juice.
Speaker C:Orange juice production is very challenged.
Speaker C:It's like cocoa.
Speaker C:Prices going up, availability going down.
Speaker C:So we create an orange juice with less orange juice, less sugar, but has better taste and a lot lower carbon.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And it's cheaper.
Speaker C:And so you have to measure everything.
Speaker C:So you measure the nutritional content, you measure the carbon, you measure the cost, etc.
Speaker C:What we do is basically we partner with companies like Howgood, for instance, and we use their platform to measure everything at the carbon footprint.
Speaker C:We have 22,000 products in our portfolio.
Speaker C:They are all with a product carbon footprint at the individual level.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:But using digital is what helps here because if you have to do that manually with life cycle analysis, it's very expensive.
Speaker C:Takes a lot of time.
Speaker C:Using platforms like that helps us to do that.
Speaker C:And then you have to track transparently, etc.
Speaker C:So then you can have the whole value chain.
Speaker C:We know, we know what we buy from the farmers.
Speaker C:We then calculate that we can process that, we put the carbon footprint there, then we give it to the brand and eventually our whole delays will get the benefit of the lower carbon product on their shelves.
Speaker B:Right, got it.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Juan, thank you so much for giving us so much of your time today.
Speaker A:Thanks again to all of you who followed along our coverage of the consumer Goods Forum.
Speaker A:Thanks again to the Vuzion Group for making this all possible.
Speaker A:Please check them out here on LinkedIn.
Speaker A:And until next time, Chris.
Speaker B:Yes, When?
Speaker B:We'll be back at Commerce next in New York City in a couple weeks.
Speaker B:Stick around for that and stay tuned until then.
Speaker B:Be careful out there.
