experience of the first lockdown period. what i learnt from that? essay for class 8
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From online working to future-proof planning, the Ice Cream Now team share lessons learnt in the Covid-19 crisis
Unprecedented is the word we seem to be reaching for most when describing the Covid-19 crisis.
Certainly for a newly established business unit like Ice Cream Now (ICNOW), facing an international crisis of this magnitude has been, and continues to be, a huge challenge.
Tasked with providing home delivery solutions for Unilever's stable of ice cream brands, including Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum, GROM and Carte d’Or, ICNOW’s main focus is on establishing partnerships and collaborations with restaurants, food chains and delivery services around the world.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has meant we have had to learn fast and react with unprecedented speed,” says Rachelle Schuimer, Global Lead, Virtual Stores (DTC) at Unilever.
Here are five lessons the team has learnt… so far!
Learn from the experience of your global colleagues
“The power of being closely connected with the community across the world is incredible – there is so much we can learn from each other,” says Rachelle.
“As the first market to experience lockdown, our China team was able to provide us with important insight and advice very early on.”
Most notably, they were able to identify the different stages of responses to the virus within the country and how these affected consumer needs.
“In the first three weeks of lockdown, ICNOW in China noted a sharp drop in ice cream sales, which is understandable as people initially focused on home and food essentials only. Surprisingly, when people recovered from the shock of having to stay at home, they began to want to treat themselves with food delivery. And after just 2–3 weeks we would see orders picking up again, way beyond our initial baseline.”
Having this kind of concrete information to work with when everything seemed so unstable was invaluable to the teams.
“Being able to anticipate this initial drop and then the pick-up ensured that those of us at an earlier stage in the crisis were able to prepare ourselves so that we could better deliver what our consumers needed when they needed it – for example by ensuring more frequent restocking at our pick-up points (PUPs) and recruiting new PUPs to be available for more consumers.