LIVEKINDLY Collective is striving to transform the entire world’s approach to food production and consumption – one plant-based innovation at a time.
Founded in 2020, the collective’s mission is to make plant-based living the new norm, and it couldn’t have come along at a better time. Statistics show that plant-based food sales topped US$1.4 billion in 2021 and have, in fact, grown 74% just in the past three years. The global plant-based food market size is expected to reach $24.8 billion by 2030.
“People want to eat healthier, and they want to reduce the number of animals they consume – and their CO2 footprint in the process,” said Remy Gillet, LIVEKINDLY’s CTO and head of Business Systems. “Our approach will support those goals, lead to a more efficient food supply chain overall, and deliver delicious food along the way.”
In order to truly transform the way the world produces and consumes food, however, LIVEKINDLY first had to transform its – and its collection of brands’ – approach to enterprise resource planning (ERP). The collective started as a small group of founders with a common goal but quickly pursued an aggressive M&A strategy designed to fold smaller companies into the overall organization. This meant incorporating a number of brands that didn’t have a proper modern ERP system previously; some were even running inventory and sales figures in spreadsheets. Today, all of LIVEKINDLY’s brands have migrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
“As we expand, we want to operate from a foundation of being born in the cloud,” Gillet said. “SAP S/4HANA gives us that global spine on which to deploy and scale our brands, and it gives us the global connection and transparency that we need to be successful. Simply put, we have a system in place that can grow as we do.”
The collective’s brands include companies like The Fry Family Food Co., Oumph!, LikeMeat, No Meat, and The Dutch Weed Burger. Nearly all of them have moved to SAP S/4HANA Cloud within the past year, implementing strong collective-wide business processes, real-time data and reporting capabilities, and a basis for continued digital growth and continuous improvement.
So, what’s next for LIVEKINDLY? According to Gillet, the collective has only scratched the surface of what it can accomplish with SAP, and it intends to continue expanding its tools and solutions in smarter and faster ways throughout 2022 and beyond. It also plans to continue expanding to key regions around the world, adding to its existing footprints in the U.S., Europe, South America, China, and more. But, above all else, it’s focused on bringing the plant-based future to bear on the world.
“We’re going to be an end-to-end company,” Gillet said. “We want to transform the entire food supply chain from seeding to feeding, and we want to help people make healthier, more informed decisions about where their food is coming from and the impact of their consumption choices. The reality is simple: this isn’t just a trend, and we intend to lead the way in our new global food economy.”
Greg Petraetis is managing director of Midmarket and Partner Ecosystem at SAP North America.