Welcome to gossip about gossip, powered by Hedera Hashgraph. In each episode, we'll cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications which will bring trust back to the internet for a soul. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of Gossip about Gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Godschalk, and I'm the SVP of Communications here at Swirlds Labs, helping to grow the Hadera ecosystem. Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Xiang Xu, who is with us from our very new council member, Mondelēz. Hi, Xiang. How are you? How are you? Sandubia. How are you? Good. So many of us probably, put Mondales's delicious treats in our mouths every day, I don't know if everybody realizes the scope of, your company and your brands and all the things that you do. So Can you share with our community a little bit about the company and, some of your products? Yeah. Thank you. It's gonna be a of a quick introduction. So my name's Anshu, and I'm leading the global COE, of technology, digital strategy and blockchain. So Mondalese, as as you just mentioned, it's famous for for, treaties and chocolates and on and auto screens. We know it already was just one of them. But beyond those, chocolates and, treaties and snacks, we also have a a digital strategy moving forward. As we knew it, so, the world is changing and, a traditional large enterprise like Mondelez has a a a clear strategy going forward how we move to next level with a digital, conversion from a traditional business into eventually a digital economy going forward. And with that, and, we had a larger team within our organization called a module manager digital service. Which truly focused on new breakthrough technology and all the things we're touching upon, including blockchain DLTs, AI, XR, VR, and the computer vision, just name a few of them. And this is important. It's one of those pillars within our strategy for next five years. If we want to address a doubling the revenue going forward for thirty to fifty, sixty billion dollars going forward next five years, and digital transformation is one of those key pillars for going forward. And digital transformation means a lot of different things to different companies for a, consumer products company like yours and a, you know, a, a food manufacturer like yours. What does that mean? Is that a more direct engagement with customers? Is that you know, testing, what what are all the things that that digital transformation encompasses? Yes. See, you just touch up one of the very important, speculative direct engagement with consumer. You know, as we would know, right, if we go to the grocery shop and and and take, audio from our it costs fifty five dollars, an order with fifteen dollars. It's just a really affordable product for everyone. So If we run-in the same business for pa for past hundred years, right? So we're gonna have organic growth and have a ten, twenty percent, and, adding on each every year. But if we want leave beyond that fifteen, twenty percent growth rate, right, then we are talking about how do how do we achieve this. We how do how do we reach the gen z consumer. Right? If we we talk about gen z consumer, they're all on the form. They're all on social media platform, if we wanna engage those those young consumer going forward and doubling our revenue progression, we need to adopt new strategy going forward. Right? So and just go to grocery store shop and buy a product. It's just one way to doing that. And general and digital strategy, right, consumer engagement? How do you using an NFT and a blockchain? Those technology to engage consumer and digital world. It's one of this most important innovation idea we're exploring today, and that is one with reason We want to work, work with Hadera DLTs and to explore potentials in that space. And that is very important for us. And can you talk to us a little bit about how you first learned about Hadera and then your journey and decision to join the governing council? Yes. I think back to August last year twenty twenty three, and as we walking through one of us, one of those, digital transformation from a traditional paper coupon. Right? We're rewarding, consumer with, coupons on paper based. Reimbursement process. And we look at one of those vendors out there. It's one of them. Who providing a transformation for for paper coupon into digital coupon phase. Right? Basically, we're talking about a seven to ten days business conversion into a twenty seconds. So this is a very, very, very interesting thing, encourages. We we had a long multiple session with QX, exploring those technologies going forward. And with that engagement, POC, we build in very successful And, we really create a there's momentum within the company from a traditional business process and business business governance model into a complete new way to engage consumer. So with that, and we learned the, the underneath technology is, hedera DLT's, And, I think, with the past six months, almost the six months POC, we truly tested and, leverage the infrastructure. We also think it's a scalable business environment, and this is very important. I think end of day, We won't reach the consumer beyond just, North America or Latin America. We won't reach it globally. In order to do that, the scalable infrastructure is a very important aspect for us. And so you mentioned SKUx. They are you know, sort of a partner that has helped you on this journey. It sounds like. Exactly. Scurate is a family all around. It's one of those leading application built on top, d l t, Hidero d l t layer, and they have a variety of applications running right now. As for now, we're just running which building a first POC on those digital coupon side, but we also explore eventually future, cross border payment, digital payment. So those type of things gonna be all part of this digital economy going forward, and we are very open and we want to explore opportunities and to see whether we can build a future digital strategy pipeline. That's our main focus. That's fantastic. And I wanna go back to just that first, you know, POC that you're talking about. With coupons, it seems like there's two key benefits there, both in terms of, you know, having that, direct connection that you talked about with the consumer and learning more about their habits and, and what they like, but also potentially reducing fraud. I think a lot of us have seen some of the movies and other depictions of how coupons can be, fraudulently used and potentially hurt the brands that are trying to offer these savings. Yeah. So this is one of those kind of, like, important, valuation process. Right? Because we don't we just don't want a, say, you know what? Okay. We achieve a huge goal as a move for a pay will be seven to ten days, process. We don't even have insight after the the the coupons redeemed by consumer. We don't now we have the twenty seconds redeemed process. We understand how the consumers redeem pro which which richer story going in, which put out the buying, we have a complete insight. But beyond that, as you mentioned, fraud prevention is one of key things. Right? We've been we've been doing that in the past many. So the reimbursement process is one of those kind of the the off shock. We're also dealing with our consumer rights, the re reimbursed those consumer because of fraud. So the ultimate removing of a fraud, right, really a hundred percent prevention of fraud going forward because of digital leisure, which we're building and have a secure and also encrypted process to validate in end user to the to the specific link. It's a tremendous benefit. So we we're promoting, internally within a month, at least not just for pumpers also for other use cases because the fraud prevention is one of the key measurement we've been putting in place in the in in the entire consumer engagement, journey. We've been doing that for past twenty and thirty years. Yeah. Well, we are very excited to welcome you to the council. I know you will start to have conversations with other council members. Is there anything in particular that you're looking forward to? Yes. You know, one of the decision factors is also we're looking at a current council member. Right? So they all across industry, and they are leading, large enterprise in all those industry segmentation, We're looking forward, right, to work with ServiceNow, Google, IBM, and Boeing's really try to leverage, try to understand, try to also learn how other large enterprises using DLTs and to improve their billing processes and move beyond the just digitization, but an interdigital economy. That's one of the key benefit we see it, and we, hopefully, we can leverage that benefit. Fantastic. Well, Sean, on behalf of the entire Hadera community, welcome. We are so excited to have you, and we look forward to being on this journey with you. Thank you very much, Sylvia. We're looking forward to working with you closely. Thank you.
