MONDELĒZ INTERNATIONAL

Mondelēz International and VR: How a virtual innovation centre revolutionised R&D and collaboration

Learn how Mondelēz International’s VR Digital Innovation Centre helps their teams to collaborate and improve product design and consumer testing.

The challenge

Snack powerhouse Mondelēz was keen to maintain and grow its global leadership position. Passionate about tech and keen to disrupt the way that things are done, Mondelēz’s innovation team faced typical sector challenges.

Speed up product development To stay at the forefront of consumer trends and ahead of the competition, Mondelēz wanted to reduce product development timescales. Bringing the sketching process and prototyping process together seemed to be the obvious next step.

Improve consumer testing Finding a more agile, efficient and high-fidelity way of testing new products with target consumers was another key goal. Recreating the environments where customers enjoy their snacks could make the testing process even more worthwhile.

Harness its global R&D talent Mondelēz was also keen to utilise and scale the collective passion and ingenuity within its R&D community. Sharing and developing ideas has always been a priority; taking those methods to the next level would be key to future success.

About the company

Mondelēz International manufactures snacks enjoyed in more than 150 countries. Its well-known range includes big names, such as Oreo, Ritz and Cadbury. With over 91,000 employees around the world, collaborating at scale is hugely important, as is leveraging tech to continually evolve processes.

Industry

Food and drink, manufacturing

Jay Gouliard,
Senior Vice President,
Mondelēz International

“

VR has also helped increase the inclusiveness of our workforce. We can bring developers from all over the world together to immersively collaborate and co-create.

An image of an interactive VR meeting space with 3D avatars

WHY VR

Why VR?

Mondelēz chose Meta for three key reasons:

1. Best-in-class experiences Mondelēz wanted to give their people high-quality VR and XR (extended reality) experiences with world-class tech hardware. Meta stood out as the partner of choice.

2. Collaboration at the heart Virtual reality and mixed reality build lasting connections that help people and organisations to learn and grow. This is even more important when colleagues are separated geographically.

3. Dependable design A tether-less device that could be used over a number of years was key to encouraging the R&D team to adopt new technology.

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Matthew Tomlinson,
Extended Reality and Metaverse Lead (R&D),
Mondelēz International

“

We love that, with Arthur, teams are able to customise meeting rooms and transform their experience without necessarily having any coding skills.

ISV FACT FILE

Arthur

Mondelēz built Simoja using Arthur. The virtual office software allows more than 100 people to meet simultaneously in extended reality. Its lifelike avatars and wide range of productivity tools make the software the perfect platform for collaboration.

The enterprise-level app provided all of the security features Mondelēz needed to develop their most important and forward-thinking ideas with confidence. And it all took place in bespoke environments made on Arthur, with a distinctive Mondelēz finish.

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Dr. Beccy Smith,
Research Fellow and Technical Director for Digital R&D,
Mondelēz International

“

We're building Simoja to be like our physical innovation centres, but virtual. People can visit an exhibition hall, the consumer suite, a 3D co-creation design space, a digital twin of a factory line or the 3D immersive data visualisation arena.

The solution

To bring its global R&D organisation together and increase collaboration, Mondelēz built a digital innovation centre using Arthur. The VR centre is named Simoja – a fusion of the words Simul and Pamoja meaning "together" in Latin and Swahili, respectively.

The virtual environment includes an Oreo-torium, exhibition halls and meeting rooms that have invigorated collaboration and R&D while helping to streamline many processes.

To launch Simoja, Mondelēz hosted 24 hours of events across every single time zone. The day highlighted virtual reality's "always on" capabilities and gave employees a chance to design Toblerone Christmas trees, explore chocolate in more detail and better understand the organisation's growth strategy.

Using the Gravity Sketch platform, Mondelēz was able to speed up industrial design of new snacks. It was also able to augment product testing of new packaging on a virtual shelf and invite consumers to sit in a virtual living room watching their favourite TV shows while snack tasting.

Future virtual experiences, such as digital twins of the Mondelēz facilities, are coming next. This will further enhance the onboarding experience for new employees regardless of location.

Sanjay Gurbuxani,
Vice President Global Digital Innovations and Regional CIO for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa,
Mondelēz International

“

We use VR to augment the experience for our consumer tasters. They feel like they're comfortably sat at home when they're tasting at our facility.

THE RESULTS

Mondelēz has embraced VR and, in doing so, has transformed the way that it works:

1,000+

colleagues have collaborated in Simoja

100+

XR experiences were launched in 2023 (400% YoY increase)

8.0+

Net promoter score for XR experiences

Hrs

3D concept design phase reduced from weeks to hours

Rich Hess,
Extended Reality Center of Excellence Lead,
Mondelēz Digital Services

“

Simoja has inspired our colleagues across our business to embrace VR for the future of work. Since the launch, we've had more than 100 activations of VR globally on topics, such as collaboration, digital twins, and learning and training. This has transformed and evolved how we work.

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