Latest / GrocerTalk / Mondelēz’s Andrew Lederman on Digital Grocery Growth Search Discovery and Agentic Commerce | Groceryshop 2026

Transcript

Mondelēz’s Andrew Lederman on Digital Grocery Growth Search Discovery and Agentic Commerce | Groceryshop 2026 · GrocerTalk

• 0:00
  Hello, everyone.
• 0:00
  This is Omnitalk Retail.
• 0:02
  I'm Ben Miller, host of Grossertalk, and I am coming to you live from Las Vegas from the Vuzion Podcast Studio booth 913 at Grocery Shop 2026.
• 0:12
  Joining me now is Andrew Lederman.
• 0:15
  Andrew is VP Global Digital Commerce at Mondelez International.
• 0:21
  Welcome, Andrew.
• 0:22
  Good to see you again.
• 0:22
  Ben.
• 0:23
  Thanks for having me.
• 0:23
  So good for you to pop by.
• 0:24
  Thank you.
• 0:25
  Look, so tell everyone, what's your remit?
• 0:27
  What does global digital commerce, what does it cover globally?
• 0:30
  Where we sell stuff online, so we spend a lot of time.
• 0:33
  You know, we have billions and billions of dollars that we spent that we sell through digital commerce.
• 0:37
  B2C, DC, B2B, lots of different places.
• 0:41
  My job is to spend some time making sure that we do it right and make sure that we build the capabilities across the globe.
• 0:46
  Okay, that's really different.
• 0:47
  People will cut a similar role to what you do differently.
• 0:51
  Some people it's selling, Some people it's capability.
• 0:53
  Some people it's marketing, which.
• 0:54
  Which are the bits are in your remit versus what's in the business units or the individual countries?
• 1:00
  Look, I think ultimately it's all my responsibility.
• 1:02
  Like, at the end of the day, I'm responsible for the number that I need to bring on a quarterly basis back to the, you know, my leadership.
• 1:09
  Love that.
• 1:09
  Yeah.
• 1:10
  And I take it that way.
• 1:11
  So I treat it as a GM type role.
• 1:12
  But you're right.
• 1:13
  At the end of the day, this is a large company.
• 1:15
  It takes a lot of folks to get all the work done.
• 1:18
  And there are BU teams that are responsible for this, some larger than others that do roll in directly into the bull.
• 1:26
  And then my group will be responsible for making sure that we're kind of setting the strategy properly, building out the capabilities that we need to be able to do, setting the focus and making sure that we're kind of
• 1:37
  giving the direction on where we need to spend our time, energy, and efforts in the markets.
• 1:41
  Okay.
• 1:42
  Prioritization of resources.
• 1:43
  So look, one of the big themes of the conference so far has been a real uptick in E Com penetration in grocery.
• 1:50
  Is that something you're seeing?
• 1:53
  And with a global hat on?
• 1:55
  We've had a lot of US conversations.
• 1:57
  Is it a common theme?
• 1:58
  Tell me what the trends are.
• 2:00
  Look, I think that digital is growing everywhere, globally.
• 2:05
  This is the direction.
• 2:06
  Some faster than others, some different places, some sub channels faster than others, depending on the market.
• 2:11
  But at the end of the day, digital is growing fast.
• 2:14
  It is what is causing a lot of the growth For Mondelez.
• 2:17
  And it's where we're spending our time, energy and effort to make sure that we're investing.
• 2:21
  So it's definitely what we're seeing is grocery is going digital.
• 2:25
  Yeah.
• 2:26
  So let's dive into some of the detail then.
• 2:28
  You talked about different channels, different speeds.
• 2:31
  Give me some examples.
• 2:32
  Where are you seeing faster growth?
• 2:33
  Where you've seen slower growth?
• 2:35
  Sure.
• 2:36
  So look, I think the places that come to mind first are India.
• 2:39
  India with quick commerce is incredible.
• 2:42
  Growing triple digit percentage year over year.
• 2:46
  Incredible to see what they can do there.
• 2:48
  They have within 10 minute delivery from companies like Zepto, Blanket, many others.
• 2:55
  Amazon now is now spending some time in India as well.
• 2:59
  But ultimately I was there this year, I checked it out.
• 3:02
  It's pretty incredible.
• 3:03
  They have these dark store models set up and you're getting chocolate Cadbury coming to your door within 10 minutes.
• 3:09
  By the time a family has finished washing their dishes from dinner, they've got chocolate on their door.
• 3:13
  It's a pretty incredible stuff.
• 3:15
  System to see and AI is basically integrated into the whole system, into the dark store and everything.
• 3:20
  It's pretty fantastic.
• 3:22
  Okay, just explain a bit more because that might not be an operation that many of our listeners are familiar with.
• 3:26
  So how are they doing 10 minutes?
• 3:29
  And what are people buying?
• 3:30
  Is this kind of item level?
• 3:32
  Are they buying baskets?
• 3:34
  Is it just in the biggest cities where you've got huge density?
• 3:37
  Describe it more.
• 3:38
  So it's definitely more popular in the biggest cities.
• 3:41
  Cities.
• 3:41
  But they are continuing to grow out into tier 2, tier 3 cities.
• 3:45
  I think this is something we're gonna have to watch and see how it works as we go.
• 3:48
  But India's got a 1.5 billion people.
• 3:51
  There's plenty of folks, there's a lot of cities.
• 3:53
  Tier 2 cities are quite the size of New York.
• 3:55
  So there's plenty of space.
• 3:58
  Basically what they do is they own operate dark stores from these guys directly.
• 4:03
  They build out like a hexagon around where they're able to serve within 10 minutes.
• 4:08
  And then they use couriers which are kind of like W9, you know, external, you know, think doordash, think Uber Eats for the kind of American and European audience.
• 4:19
  And ultimately those folks are delivering within the 10 minute window.
• 4:22
  Right, right.
• 4:23
  The pick and pack is happening within just a couple minutes.
• 4:26
  They're running around the store.
• 4:27
  There's a clock on the wall.
• 4:28
  They're trying to do it as fast as possible.
• 4:30
  It's all about ideal efficiency in terms of basket size.
• 4:35
  Quite small still, so it's not full grocery I think US grocery baskets are pretty rare in most of the world.
• 4:44
  People tend to do smaller, more frequent orders in Latin America, Asia, Africa.
• 4:49
  So these are places that, you know, you wouldn't expect this.
• 4:52
  So again, people can go with something as small as, you know, some chocolate, get dark chocolate delivered right to their door.
• 4:58
  And the economics do work, which is pretty incredible.
• 5:01
  Yeah.
• 5:02
  Okay.
• 5:03
  We talk quite a lot about this need for speed.
• 5:06
  There's been a lot of conversation here about the US the increasing need for speed, the sub day delivery, that's a great example from India, Brazil.
• 5:18
  You must have a big business in Brazil.
• 5:19
  What are you seeing there?
• 5:21
  Brazil is an incredible market.
• 5:23
  There is such a fast pace of change.
• 5:26
  What we're seeing there again there is Last Milers, totally different model, the aggregator model, more like a doordash or renewable kind of feel.
• 5:33
  Social commerce is on the rise and TikTok shop is starting to grow there similar to how it has in Southeast Asia, China and now the US as well.
• 5:42
  So quite an interesting market.
• 5:44
  And the other thing that's really interesting about Brazil is the cash and carries.
• 5:48
  So they have these big businesses that are effectively think somewhere between like a of kind Costco and like a Food Depot kind of area where Ataca dough is one of them that does incredibly well and folks are getting
• 6:02
  a ton of products going in that direction.
• 6:03
  And those guys, which are now kind of the Omni players if you will, of Brazil are digitalizing very quickly.
• 6:10
  Right.
• 6:10
  Really interesting, really interesting.
• 6:11
  So that's the landscape, need for speed globally.
• 6:17
  As a manufacturer of predominantly impulse products, how are you evolving your kind of digital strategy to align with this?
• 6:26
  Well, we've got both impulse and planned.
• 6:28
  So if you think about in the US things like Oreo or Ritz, a lot of times people are pre planning and purchasing as part of these regular everyday grocery orders.
• 6:36
  So we're looking at both sides of the spectrum.
• 6:38
  We look at as planned and unplanned is typically the way we refer to it.
• 6:41
  Okay.
• 6:42
  And we're thinking, you know, for something like Amazon, if you're buying, you know, bags of mini Oreos, a multi unit pack, something like this that you're going to be putting in your kids lunch, that's a specific occasion that
• 6:53
  we want to focus on and pay attention to.
• 6:54
  On the flip side, somebody who wants some Cadbury wants some Milka and they want it now and that's more of an impulse type purchase, we're happy to serve that need as well.
• 7:02
  So we're thinking about it from a PPA perspective.
• 7:04
  We're Thinking about it from a content perspective and making sure that we're serving different needs around specific occasions, especially the ones that are more incremental to our business.
• 7:13
  Okay, so when we starting to build up into kind of a another theme, which is search and discovery.
• 7:22
  So how are you seeing that evolving?
• 7:24
  What are you seeing your shoppers doing differently in that space?
• 7:27
  Look, I think search is always important, and there's no doubt or change there.
• 7:31
  But I think discovery is fundamentally changing.
• 7:33
  And when you think about what's happening, I see basically algorithmic demand generation.
• 7:39
  And this happens in three fronts.
• 7:40
  This might be retailers for search.
• 7:42
  This might be, you know, agentic shopping coming from the LLMs and social media.
• 7:49
  These are all algorithms that are effectively driving how our brands are getting to consumers.
• 7:55
  And that's a place where we do have to spend a lot of our time and make sure that we understand the algorithms.
• 8:00
  We're marketing to agents, we're marketing in these platforms properly to make sure we get to consumers the right way, whether they're looking for us or the platforms are bringing our products to them.
• 8:10
  Okay, so somebody I spoke to recently who did a similar role to you said, ben, digital commerce is simple.
• 8:16
  It's just a game of understanding algorithms.
• 8:19
  So you just hinted towards that.
• 8:21
  I don't think it's simple at all.
• 8:22
  And these algorithms are changing all the time.
• 8:25
  How are you going about doing that, Amanda?
• 8:27
  I would certainly not say it's simple.
• 8:29
  I would just say that I think a lot of these things build on top of each other.
• 8:32
  And it's why it's very important to not get behind the curve, because we are creating many different shelves for ourselves to optimize and deal with.
• 8:38
  So if you think about retail media, search is an incredibly important place to win, especially if you're trying to drive volume for what you're doing.
• 8:47
  We've worked very hard on that system over the last couple of years, and now we're building in new systems like Agentix Shopping that we hadn't had before.
• 8:56
  So making sure we're putting in the right measurement, we're building out the right content.
• 9:00
  We're focusing on the occasions, we're putting training programs in for our brands to make sure our brand teams to learn what they need to know so that they're actually marketing to these agents, not just consumers.
• 9:12
  And that's a thought process that we all need to take.
• 9:14
  Now, what do you find?
• 9:16
  Can you share some examples, Andrew, of what has been successful for you in being discovered on these platforms?
• 9:22
  Because we keep hearing really mixed things about this whole idea of GEO or AEO and what it can do or can't do, what have you found is working?
• 9:31
  Look, I think again back to this occasions piece.
• 9:34
  I think the way people are searching and using these platforms, they're not jumping onto ChatGPT and saying cookies.
• 9:40
  That's not happening.
• 9:41
  That may happen on a walmart.com, but when it comes to the LLMs, they're very contextual.
• 9:47
  My son has soccer games on Thursday afternoons.
• 9:52
  I'm responsible to bring the snacks.
• 9:53
  What are some good snacks I can bring?
• 9:55
  These are really contextual things that we have to think about.
• 9:57
  So it starts there of what are the occasions that you want to go and win?
• 10:02
  And this is something you need to partner with your brand teams to make sure you understand.
• 10:05
  Okay.
• 10:06
  Then from there you have to make sure that you know, where are the citation sources coming from in order to activate against that occasion.
• 10:13
  So for us, what are we seeing?
• 10:14
  What are we thinking about?
• 10:15
  We're seeing PDPs, of course, is a big piece of that puzzle.
• 10:19
  Earned Media is a big piece as well, but nothing's coming out at 50%.
• 10:24
  Everything's coming out at 1% citation source.
• 10:26
  You have to have a very diverse.
• 10:28
  Structure, a very broad.
• 10:28
  Okay, interesting.
• 10:30
  And then of course, the Reddit and the YouTube that I'm sure everybody's already talked about is still up there, but it's not like it once was, where it was all predominantly coming from there.
• 10:38
  And then what we're seeing is starting to grow.
• 10:40
  Still small, but starting to grow is brand authority.
• 10:43
  Things like our sites, our websites.
• 10:44
  Okay.
• 10:45
  Because ultimately, at the end of the day for these LLMs, trust is a huge factor.
• 10:51
  So making sure that you get the right information from authority sources is going to become progressively more important.
• 10:57
  So just a quick splash of some of the things we've learned as we've gone, but we still have a long ways to go.
• 11:03
  But we're putting a measurement in.
• 11:04
  We're looking at this across all of our top eight markets.
• 11:07
  Fantastic, Andrew.
• 11:09
  I think we're going to have to call it that, but thank you so much for joining us.
• 11:12
  Thanks to the team at Vuzion and the Grocery Shop for making the coverage of this conference possible.
• 11:18
  And stay tuned for more.