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Las Vegas – Unilever does not want to leave any stone unturned to talk of implementing Artificial Intelligence in her ice cream supply chain, executive Sandeep Desai said during a panel in Manifest 2025 last week.
The CPG veteran currently uses AI to analyze weather data to develop more accurate amounts of forecast and limit waste, as the demand for ice cream is affected by the temperature, According to a January newsThis takes advantage of AI in its freezer cabinets in its factories for more efficient production for real -time inventory updates.
“We are trying to integrate it to the end, so all the ways from suppliers to consumers,” said the EVP and the main product supply chain officer for the company’s ice cream business.
But emerging technologies have not solved every supply chain challenge for the ice cream supply chain. A region that the company is still trying to improve its visibility is in the last mile of delivery, usually from a customer’s distribution center to a freezer, according to Desai. He said that the company can get additional trekking capacity through connected sensors “which can talk directly on the cloud,” but the cost -effective deployment of that technique remains a barrier.
“If we were transporting diamonds, it is cheap, technology is available, it is there. We can do it,” Desai said. “When you are transporting ice cream, where every mother and pop believe they can also make ice cream, it is a quite margin-sensitive game, and therefore the cost of technology is what needs to come. [down],
According to Desai, the fleet management of integrating AI capabilities in supply chains remains the “most difficult aspect”. He said that applying real-time monitoring in all trucks of Unilever’s ice cream means that he said to cooperate with the fragmented mixture of both large trucking carriers and owner-operators, he said.
Desai said, “If you look at the goods of the ocean today, what it was a few years ago, has been made important,” Desai said, the company has not seen the same in trucking.
Even with cost and integration challenges, Desai said that it is important to experiment and operate with new technology. The cost will fall as the progress and scale of those initial programs, the executive of the supply chain said, as an example, using the work of the unilever with machine learning and AI for the demanding plan.
Desai said, “We have believed in that process. We cannot give up piloting. We cannot give up on scaling. And I think the key is partnership.” “You need to find a really right partner who also sees a long -term vision. It’s not a short -term game. It’s about long -term.”
A long -term priority for Unilever’s ice cream business is more automation within its network of warehouses. Using highly automatic “dark” warehouse Drone technology Cold chain for stock management will be rapidly important in logistics, especially to compensate for the challenges tied to work in low -temperature environment, Desai said.
Within Unilever’s ice cream business, about 10% of its warehouses are currently dark, and the company is insisting on increasing that percentage over the next several years, he said.
“My vision is that all warehouses should be 100% dark,” Desai said.
Unilever’s ice cream business has been slapped to remove the rest of the CPG by the end of this year, a step that may be Introduce supply chain capacityIn 2024, the underlying sales of the segment increased 3.7% due to “strong innovations and operational reforms”, ” An earning,
