Barry Callebaut is what Salesforce calls a ‘Trailblazer.’ The company embraces the broad Salesforce portfolio and is better positioned than many to develop modern processes and think about concrete AI applications.
Barry Callebaut makes chocolate, and a lot of it. The company supplies cocoa and chocolate to businesses around the world. The focus is entirely on B2B: the chocolate that Barry Callebaut makes is processed into confectionery by other manufacturers. Chocolatiers also source their products from the company, which was created in 1996 by the merger of the Belgian Callebaut with the French Cacao Barry. The chocolate specialist sells virtually nothing directly to consumers.
Salesforce expert
Today, Barry Callebaut is not only a world-leading expert in chocolate. For more than a decade, the organization has also built up expertise in Salesforce. “We started our Salesforce journey in 2011, well before I joined the company,” says Anaïs Loits, Digital Sales Director for the company.
“Before the transition, we worked with paper, spreadsheets, and some other tools like Lotus Notes to process complaints,” she says. That couldn’t continue. To support the sales teams, Barry Callebaut first embraced Salesforce’s CRM system. After the Sales Cloud came the Service Cloud, and in the meantime, the chocolate maker also relies on the Marketing Cloud, the Experience Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Tableau, Agentforce, the Data Cloud, and more.
It seems easier to ask which Salesforce product the organization doesn’t have. “Slack,” says Loits resolutely. “We have 12,000 people worldwide, and although Salesforce has a very strong position in our company, it’s about 3,700 users. The rest work in other tools, such as our SAP-ERP system, so the choice for an alternative collaboration tool had already been made in practice.”
Trailblazer
Even without Slack (or rather Agentic OS), Barry Callebaut is a great example of what the broad Salesforce ecosystem has to offer. As early as 2011, the company wanted to work with a
“For Barry Callebaut, Salesforce is a management platform for all their relationships,” adds Tom Asselman, Head of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce in Belgium. “They not only manage the relationship with their customers, but also with their suppliers. Many of the features of our CRM product also apply to the relationship with suppliers. It’s actually a kind of reverse CRM functionality.”
For Barry Callebaut, Salesforce is a management platform for all their relationships.
Tom Asselman, Head of Enterprise Sales, Salesforce Belgium
Complete overview
Barry Callebaut now has a 360° overview of all its partners via Salesforce. This is important, given the unique coherence between sales, purchasing, and product development at the company. Loits: “If a salesperson sees an opportunity, that can cause R&D to start developing a new product to meet a need. That in turn requires new raw materials, which must come from a supplier. Everything is connected and is in Salesforce.”
For Loits, the flexibility of the platform is also important. “We have some complex needs that are very specific to our company,” she explains. “This concerns the introduction of a new product at R&D, or the transfer of a recipe to another factory in another region. These are very complex matters, where processes, certificates, legal considerations, and more come together. The applications we have built for this also all run on Salesforce.”
All intelligence resides within Salesforce.
Anaïs Loits, Digital Sales Director Barry Callebaut
“All intelligence resides within Salesforce,” she continues. “The platform is in the middle and provides the orchestration.”
Partners but also own knowledge
The integration of Salesforce within Barry Callebaut has always gone smoothly. Internally, Barry Callebaut has a modest team of five people who take care of the process, but they know the products well. That team is assisted by consultants and partners.
“Accenture is historically our main implementation partner,” says Loits, “although we also work with others such as Cognizant. Furthermore, our internal team has a very strong knowledge of Salesforce.”
Barry Callebaut has grown in this. Loits: “That wasn’t always the case, but today we know the product and set out the best practices. We want a coherent experience across the entire Salesforce platform. It cannot be that two Salesforce apps, built by different consultants, have a different logic. So we are constantly looking at and evaluating what our IT partners are doing.”
Ready for AI
As a mature Salesforce user who has maintained a single source of truth for data from partners and customers for more than a decade, Barry Callebaut is exceptionally well-positioned to reap the benefits of AI. Asselman also agrees: “They have a lot of data and are therefore ahead of many other parties,” he notes.
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That has led to a concrete plan after a visit to Dreamforce this year. “We have defined a good use case for Agentforce,” Loits explains. “On the Barry Callebaut website, we have the Chocolate Academy for chocolatiers. There, we are working on a chatbot that can directly answer questions. For example, if a chocolatier indicates that they are working on a new mousse, the chatbot can immediately give tips and suggestions about techniques and products.”
Start cautiously
Loits believes that modest start is important. “The biggest risk with AI is the lack of experience. Everything is new. We need to learn what works and what doesn’t, and build maturity in this way.”
Barry Callebaut is now building that maturity with Agentforce. More is possible in a next step, although not all data is ready. “A lot of data is in SAP. Via the Salesforce Data Cloud, we still need to build a link to SAP to really bring all the information together,” says Loits.
Eye on the future
Barry Callebaut’s focus is on the future. In addition to the first experiments with AI, the company is also working on the integration of the Manufacturing Cloud (or Agentforce Manufacturing), in the context of the large Next Level transformation project. In this context, transforming does not mean digitizing or modernizing, because Barry Callebaut already has a modern digital data foundation. Now is the time to build further on that foundation.
Loits gives another example: “We are working on a project with the Experience Cloud, combined with the B2B Commerce Cloud. We want to develop a more integrated order process for our B2B customers, with a portal where all important documents are located. The goal is to achieve an Amazon-like experience with self-service, notifications when a truck with chocolate has left, and agents to solve questions.”
In this way, Salesforce is at the core of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer, both for the daily processes today and the ambitions of tomorrow. “I can’t even imagine how we did everything before Salesforce,” Loits concludes.