There’s data to be mined with every sip of a soda and crunch of a snack. PepsiCo is increasingly leveraging data science to understand its consumer habits and needs and, along the way, unlock new growth.

The venerable CPG recently teamed up with The Kroger Co.'s 84.51° customer analytics arm to capture and leverage data at scale. After using the 84.51° Collaborative Cloud, PepsiCo shared some of its learnings and supplied advice for CPGs across the spectrum.

Barbara Connors, VP, strategy and acceleration for 84.51°, recapped some of those top findings for PepsiCo. “The three big things they learned were creating the right structure, prioritizing the right work that will have the greatest impact and giving new teams space to learn,” she told Progressive Grocer.

Connors highlighted the importance of those steps, for PepsiCo and for other organizations keen on best using the wealth of today’s available data. Creating the right structure, for example, involves having a dedicated cross-functional partnership between corporate headquarters teams and work streams, as well as ways of working across traditional areas of insights, category management and advanced analytics. Creating a strong delineation between classical data scientists and data analysts is also crucial, she noted.

Meanwhile, Connors pointed out, PepsiCo affirmed that prioritizing the right work for the greatest impact includes sales teams, headquarters teams and the customer, and also requires the alignment of resources and a roadmap for an executional launch. Giving new teams space to learn sets a CPG up for success, after they recognize the nuances of data sets, master any necessary new languages and codes and determine when to use each data source depending in the insights uncovered.

Rich data, in turn, has influenced strategies to elevate PepsiCo’s brand performances at Kroger. “They embedded the research in new ways,” said Connors. Among other results, data science collaboration provided important support for the Kroger customer teams to deliver yearly commitments across the portfolio and elevated retail partnerships by enabling granular analysis in test solutions.

On another, broader level, PepsiCo used findings to better understand evolving beverage trends and analyze the snacking landscape. Ultimately, by working with the 84.51° Collaborative Cloud, the CPG was able to enrich, assess and understand basket analyses, conversion opportunities, segmentation matrices and e-commerce adoption. From there, they are also directly activating off these insights, leveraging the platform to build their own retail media audiences for Kroger Precision Marketing campaigns, according to Connors.