Food industry
Move beyond “the way we’ve always done things” and build ownership of growth across the organisation
Retail chains are putting you under pressure. ESG and traceability demand attention. At the same time, the leadership team needs to keep sales, production and R&D aligned, while middle managers are expected to turn strategy into action in an already busy day-to-day operation.The strategy itself is rarely the problem. The challenge is the disconnect between your ambitions and what actually happens in day-to-day operations and commercial behaviour.
More than 30 companies in the food industry have worked with Intenz to connect strategy, leadership and commercial behaviour. Lantmännen Unibake, Cerealia, Uhrenholt and Fertin are among them.
What we often help food companies achieve
- Turn the leadership team into one team that owns and drives the strategy together.
- Giving your leaders the skills and structure to move from busy to focused.
- Gain clarity on what it takes to drive sales growth.
- Create a shared commercial approach that improves sales effectiveness.
At Uhrenholt, the strategy became a shared commitment – and ambitions grew.
Build a strong leadership team in 90 days
From a leadership team that can run the business to one that can drive the strategy.
"We are strong individually, but struggle to work effectively across functions."
"Our leadership meetings have become status updates and firefighting. We never get to the strategic issues."
"We operate as a group of leaders, rather than as one leadership team.
In food production, every function depends on the others. Especially when a new strategy has to become part of everyday behaviour. Sales can only promise lead times that production can meet. Production can only meet them if the KAMs do not overpromise. And R&D must have new variants ready before the category’s listing window closes. No function can manage this alone.
It requires one leadership team that owns the strategy together and drives it across functions.
Developing that kind of leadership team takes more than a series of team-building events. Leaders need to solve cross-functional challenges together: set shared priorities, take collective responsibility for the whole business and use a meeting structure that separates operations from strategy.
Improve sales effectiveness
The sellers work too differently and move to price too quickly.
"Our sellers sell the product, not the value. It's costing us contribution margin."
“We have strong products, data and category expertise, but we are not translating them clearly enough into our sales approach.”
"We have trained our sellers before. It just didn't change enough in the day-to-day."
You already have much of what it takes: product knowledge, category data, R&D, strong supply chain capabilities and a service organisation close to your customers. The problem is that these strengths do not always translate into a shared commercial approach. Too often, best practice exists only in the minds of your strongest KAMs. That makes sales difficult to manage, difficult to train and difficult to repeat across customers and markets.
The solution is to make effective selling clear enough for everyone to follow. Who you target. How you open the category conversation. How you qualify opportunities. How you sell value before price. And how sales leaders follow up so the new behaviours become part of everyday work.
This is not another sales training programme. You get a shared sales process, a playbook developed together with your own KAMs, and practical plays for the situations that determine whether you win: assessment of needs, value selling, category conversations, closing and protecting margin. Not just on slides, but translated into changed behaviour within 90 days.
Reinvented the KAM role, enabling the largest customers to be developed through strategic projects rather than operations, price and logistics.
Lantmännen Unibake Saved millions year after year by turning Continuous Improvement into leadership behaviours that became part of everyday operations.
Help your leaders move the business from A to B
Your leaders have been on the course. Three months later, they are leading exactly as before.
"We have trained our leaders before, but it doesn't change their day-to-day behaviour."
"Operations take up all their time, so strategy becomes just another task in the calendar."
“Leaders spend their time firefighting in their own functions instead of driving progress together.
In food production, something always needs urgent attention. The line must keep running. Orders must go out. Customers are calling. Leaders take responsibility and keep day-to-day operations on track while the strategy slips into the background.
It is not because the leaders lack the will. They lack a development programme that starts with their own reality rather than generic models. When leadership development is disconnected from the real business challenges leaders face, it remains classroom knowledge. Interesting on the day, but difficult to apply in production, in sales and across functions.
We give you a development programme where leaders work on real strategic challenges, practise new behaviours in their day-to-day work and get the structures needed to make them stick. Senior leadership takes part, so mandates, priorities and time change alongside the leaders. The goal is not more leadership development. The goal is leaders who create progress.
“I find Intenz highly empathetic and engaging. They create understanding and bridge the gap between theory and the reality we work in. That is the foundation for making our cultural change a success.”
Per Stryhn, CEO
Why Intenz
Business and people. Two realities that must come together before everyone can take ownership of growth.
You invest significant resources in strategies, budgets, category plans, ESG requirements and new commercial ambitions. Meanwhile, day-to-day operations continue at full speed, driven by retail chains, customers, production, R&D and deliveries. Behaviour follows a logic of its own, often far removed from what you set out to design.
Growth does simply not happen because the plan is right. It happens when people understand the “why”, help shape the “how” and develop the skills needed to turn it into “what” happens on Monday morning. That requires a shared language between the blue and the red: business and people. We call this Purple Reality: a reality where direction and behaviour align. That is exactly what we help you create.
So when food companies want to create growth that everyone owns, they call us.
What do you get?
Transformation, energy and growth that you can begin to measure after 90 days.
The return on investment from transformation is rarely a simple calculation. But the impact becomes visible when the strategy comes to life in day-to-day operations. When the leadership team makes better decisions. When salespeople work more consistently. When the organisation spends less energy on noise and more on what drives growth.
Lantmännen Unibake · Built momentum behind the strategy in record time and saved millions year after year by embedding new leadership principles in everyday work.
Uhrenholt · Developed a new strategy together for the first time, creating local ownership across more than 20 markets and a shared ambition.
Fertin · Moved its production culture towards pharmaceutical standards, reducing downtime and waste.
KMC · Accelerated its sales process with practical tools that made it easier to turn product knowledge into customer value.
Book a 30-minute conversation with us
Get everyone to take ownership of your growth by next quarter (without a new strategy or standard training programmes)