Case Study Details - Global Foresight Network - Mondelez International-Leading the Future of Snacking

Situation: Mondelez International, the $90 billion global snacking powerhouse responsible for brands like Oreo and Milka, operates with a strong global footprint across over 80 countries. This operation takes place within a complex and dynamic external environment. In 2018, the company unveiled a new global strategy centered on the mission of "snacking made right," which explicitly requires them to "lead the future of snacking" around the world. The company's CEO, Dirk Van de Put, strongly promoted the idea of leading from the future, emphasizing the need to envision and understand the future so that the company can collectively create a strategy for long-term success.

Complication: The need for a formal foresight intervention arose because the company had to translate its new mission of "leading the future of snacking" into actionable strategic outcomes. The leadership team recognized that to sustain long-term growth in a dynamic market, their strategy needed to be rooted in future thinking. This required understanding what the future of snacking would look like, not just in a couple of years, but over the longer term. Foresight was necessary to promote long-term thinking and spearhead a forward-looking culture across the organization, ensuring company leaders became "ambassadors of the future" with a clear vision for the next decade.

Solution: Mondelez established a standalone Strategic Foresight function to act as the centre of excellence for future thinking. They deployed a small foresight unit, initially just two people, based on the Prometheus model. This model avoids relying on a large, central "Oracle" department; instead, it leverages the knowledge, passion, and expertise of the entire company to champion the foresight approach. This team building a strategic foresight community, already 30 people, who are trained and empowered to act as local strategic foresight champions in their respective business units. The core methodology employed is an impact-oriented trend management process consisting of three phases:

Perceiving (detecting change through horizon scanning and trend management)
Prospecting (understanding which changes are critical for the business and prioritizing significant trends),
Probing (acting upon prioritized changes by embedding trend management into strategic activities)

To support this, they use a proprietary interactive trend management platform called FTR, which hosts their holistic trend framework and includes modules for trend evaluation, prioritization, and deriving opportunities and threats. Furthermore, scenario planning is utilized routinely to understand critical future states, ensuring the foresight approach is fully embedded into the company’s key strategic processes.

Impact / Outcome

The company created its Vision 2030 strategy, setting an ambitious goal of becoming the global leader in snacking within the next decade, with future thinking playing a critical role in shaping this direction. To support this ambition, a standalone Strategic Foresight function was established as a centre of excellence for future oriented activities, and the foresight approach has since been fully embedded into key strategic processes, with scenario planning routinely used for long term planning. From an initial team of just two people, the foresight unit has grown a strategic foresight community of more than thirty members who act as empowered local champions across the organisation. At the same time, the company has maintained a leading market position, holding the number one global spot in biscuits and number two in chocolate, alongside strong revenue growth of 14% in 2023 and steady progress against ESG goals. A future focused culture is being actively built through internal engagement initiatives such as e-learning courses, monthly foresight newsletters, and quarterly webinars aimed at strengthening future-thinking literacy. This effort is further supported by a proprietary interactive trend management platform, FTR, which hosts a holistic trend framework to evaluate and prioritise trends and to identify emerging opportunities and threats. The platform and the foresight community also enable a strong geographical perspective, allowing trends to be adapted to regional or country specific contexts where needed. Finally, the foresight function works closely with Snack Futures, an internal “startup” team with a mandate to explore the future of snacking through trial and error, making it a key stakeholder in external exploration.