Golden State Foods Corp.’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer Bob Wolpert learned plenty about technology while an intern at Lockheed Martin Corp. His curiosity for tech has stayed with him since.
“I never was a technologist for technology’s sake,” Wolpert said. “I was always running a division or part of a business, and I used technology to create a compelling offer or competitive advantage.”
That helped when he was with ITT Corp., and later a spinoff business called Xylem Inc., where he was running global divisions before coming to Golden State Foods.
At Irvine-based GSF, long one of OC’s largest privately held businesses, he oversees innovation at a $5 billion food maker and distributor feeding 5 billion people daily.
Wolpert came to know Golden State CEO Mark Wetterau as both executives’ daughters play lacrosse. Over time, Wetterau floated the idea of Wolpert looking into Golden State.
Although Wolpert wasn’t initially in the market for a new job, he eventually joined the firm, wooed by the idea of a position that would allow him to remain in Orange County and be at a company that had a strong growth record.
Part of that growth has been aided through the constant tweaking to improve processes, and Wolpert’s part on that front helped him nab an Innovator of the Year award last month from the Business Journal (see other profiles, pages 1, 6, and 8).
Golden State, with 10 innovation centers globally, has used technology and other developments to move faster and more nimbly in several areas. It is constantly developing new recipes for foods, beverages and sauces; improving product packaging; and, more recently, creating shelf-stable milk that went to food banks across the U.S.
High-Tech Tracking
A 40-year partnership with IBM for equipment and software most recently bore out in implementation of blockchain, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies to help Golden State Foods gain greater visibility of its supply chain.
“We had a brainstorming session three years ago on what were the big technologies over the next five-plus years that were going to impact businesses … and, at the time, I was running all of our logistics business for Golden State Foods and sort of a lightbulb went on for me.”
Currently, transparency within supply chains depends on what the industry refers to as one up, one down visibility. That is, Wolpert and team are able to see what came into a Golden State Foods plant or ERP system and where it was shipped. However, to dig deeper into the individual ingredients or see the entire process of different stops a product might make along the journey to its final destination, it’s much more difficult and can take days, weeks or even months to track.
“Blockchain struck me as a transformational opportunity,” Wolpert said, adding the ability for many parties to access that data in a secure way is one part of the solution the technology provides.
“Part two [of the solution] is if you think of our world 10 years from now, much of what we do is going to have a digital signal along the way. So, imagine the journey of a physical good is also going to have time/date stamps or other information as it travels,” Wolpert said.
If it’s, for example, a head of lettuce, information accessible through technology could include water quality of the field it was grown in or chemical content.
Moving with Change
“There’s going to be data that today might exist on clipboards in islands of information, but that with a digital device you could attach to that blockchain record,” he said.
Like many executives heading innovation within their organizations, the experience of COVID impacted the rate at which certain projects have been tackled.
“For those things that we directly control and have, we see immediate benefit. We can go faster,” Wolpert said. “But the second part of the answer, for those things that require buy in and consensus across different company participation, it makes it a little harder because good old fashioned face-to-face meetings tend to have a better history of getting people to build a relationship, build trust and then drive adoption.”
Blockchain, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will remain high on the Golden State innovation team’s radar.
Keeping up to date is all part of the job and perhaps constant challenge for Wolpert to ensure Golden State remains at the forefront of industry change.
“I think this is becoming the norm for many executives and that’s the speed of change,” Wolpert said. “What were long cycle businesses that would take time for things to happen so you have time to react with technology, today you could get disrupted quickly.”
