About George Vindiola
In a September 2023 appearance, George Vindiola, then Vice President of research and development for Campbell Snacks, discussed the role of diverse perspectives in the company's innovation process. He described the formation of Campbell Snacks from Snyder's Lance and Pepperidge Farm as bringing together "disparate brands, processes, but especially the people." Vindiola noted that the combination included distinct cultures from companies such as Stars of Hanover, Lance, and Kettle Foods, and that his own non-legacy background was part of why he was brought in.
Vindiola stated that integrating "four or five different ways of thinking and ways of working" was initially challenging, requiring a baseline level of agreement on processes. However, he said the diversity of thought ultimately allowed teams to "challenge each other" and "innovate in a better way—not necessarily faster, but better." He attributed this to the ability to draw on different points of view to reach a stronger final product.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from George Vindiola's recent appearances.
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Transcript (1 segments)
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George Vindiola0:08
But then when we formed Campbell Snacks from Snyder's Lance and Pepperidge Farm, it was the disparate brands, processes, but especially the people that we brought together. So you had a Pepperidge Farm way of doing things, and Snyder's Lance was really a combination of like several different companies. There was Snyder's of Hanover, there was Lance, and then there was Kettle Foods. Kind of those three had come together not that long before we acquired them, so they were kind of still three distinct cultures, I would say. Then you bring a fourth in with Pepperidge, and so the diversity of thoughts really helped us, right? Because it wasn't just the Pepperidge way, which, oh by the way, when I came in from a different experience, I was disrupting that. That was part of the reason I think they brought me in, was because I wasn't legacy Pepperidge. I'd been in a different company doing things a different way. So now you bring like these four or five different ways of thinking and ways of working together. Number one, it was hard, right? Because you had to kind of get to a certain baseline level of understanding on how we were going to do things. But number two, it was also exciting because you could challenge each other because we all had different points of view, we had different ways of doing things. And so that helped us ultimately, once we were all well integrated, to actually innovate in a better way. I wouldn't say necessarily in a faster way, but in a better way, because we could challenge each other and get to a better end product at the end of the day.
