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Innovation Through Insights with Matt Thell of General Mills

March 12, 2024

On our first episode of Champions of Purposeful Change, Matt Thell of General Mills takes us through his career journey and shares stories from along the way. Matt is part of an internal strategic consultancy that helps General Mills pursue a range of innovation opportunities – and he’s passionate about putting insights at the center of the work.

 

 

Bill Gullan:

Greetings, one and all. Welcome to Champions of Purposeful Change. I’m Bill Gullan, President of Finch Brands, and your host for a conversation today with Matt Thell of General Mills, who’s a senior strategy manager. As he will relate to you, that cuts across various components of innovation and certainly involves insights. And we’re grateful to Matt for his time. He’s going to take you through his career as well as how he’s wired, the way he’s wired, what his organization works on, and what their focus is. So enjoy hearing from Matt Thell. We are so excited to have Matt Thell with us. Matt is a senior strategy manager for the global marketing organization at General Mills. Thanks for joining us, my friend.

Matt Thell:

Yeah, happy to be here. Happy to chat about things.

Bill Gullan:

Excellent. And I know there’s so much that you’ve accomplished, and can’t wait to hear. And why don’t we start at the beginning if we could, a little bit of how you’ve traversed your academic and career journey. I know a chemical engineering undergraduate degree and now in the role that you’re in. Could you take us through that career path? What led you here and what lights you up about it?

Matt Thell:

Yeah. I guess I’d say never underestimate the power of a coach.

Bill Gullan:

Yes.

Matt Thell:

And by coach, I mean my football coach when I was 10. Because I was playing one day and he called me aside and he’s like, Matty. Like, yeah. Because every football coach I ever had called me Matty, whether prompted or not.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

He’s like, are you good at science? I was like, yeah. He’s like, are you good at math? I was like, yeah. He’s like, you should be a chemical engineer like me. I was like-

Bill Gullan:

Oh wow.

Matt Thell:

Oh. Okay. Why not? And basically that’s the path I went down. I went through high school, went to undergrad, did the work, and then ultimately I realized that kind of at the core of it, I didn’t love the tenets of chemical engineering. It wasn’t filling my cup. So then I’m like, uh, kind of stuck here. I got this degree that I’m going to finish here soon. And I tried to think about what it was, and I was like, oh, you know what I do love though? I love food. So let’s figure out a way to make this work together. So General Mills was the perfect fit. They made lots of food that I loved. I was practically eating my body weight in Gushers every year, so that was good.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

They were going to let me be an engineer that didn’t have to deal with things like Reynolds numbers and constant stirred tank reactor simulations. And so I started out, I was a developer for Chex Mix and Bugles and Gardetto’s. And it was great.

Bill Gullan:

Nice.

Matt Thell:

I was doing front end innovation, which I found I really loved the fuzzy front end. But then as I went on, I was like, ah, maybe there are some things that maybe I want to reconsider. Some things happened and I was like, huh, maybe there’s something else. And I’m trying to think. There was … Okay, so there was this one time when I had to go out to Milwaukee to the plant that makes Gardetto’s, and it was an overnight run. And so basically I planned to fly in at night, run at two in the morning, and then fly out in the morning. Didn’t get a hotel room or anything like that. The key part to this is that the thing that makes Gardetto’s so delicious is it’s got this slurry that you spray on it. So basically it’s a mixture of the oil. Think about if you made Chex Mix at home. You mix the butter, you mix the seasoning, and so it’s great. And so I’m running the test and all’s going well, and then without warning, a hose breaks. And it’s just in the movies, it’s flapping all over the place. And it covers me head to toe in Italian cheese blend, which is the most aromatic of the seasonings.

So I have no hotel room, I have nothing to do. So I borrow a spare uniform from someone at the plant, and I don’t have time to shower, and I’m boarding the plane. And I’m kind of looking around, I got my normal clothes in a plastic bag. And I plop down, and the person next to me just kind of looks over and I was like, you know what? I was like, I’ll buy you a drink and tell you a really good story if you just bear with me for the next half hour or so.

It was things like that where I’m like, ah, I like front-end innovation, but maybe this is not the exact thing that I’m looking for.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. A seatmate on the plane may appreciate someone doing more of an office job. You sure your football coach wasn’t just suggesting to you very gently that maybe you weren’t cut out for the NFL? Maybe you should consider something else?

Matt Thell:

It’s funny because my ten-year-old brain processed it as like, oh, he sees something in me. And maybe it was like he did not see something in me.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, he’s digging you. So across what at this point I think is a 20-plus year career at General Mills now, how have, you mentioned starting the front end piece, and having some of those wonderful experiences with ingredients in your clothes, but talk a little bit about the journey inside as you moved, I guess you were in the international group at one point, you’re now sort of on that innovation and strategy team. How has that journey been within what is really a great global company?

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about General Mills is we have this broader portfolio, and so there’s so many different things you can work on. And I’m a big breadth person, not a depth person.

Bill Gullan:

Yes.

Matt Thell:

And so I love the fact that one day I’m working on cat wet food, and then the next day I’m working on Fruit by the Foot and things like that. But internally, basically, I went back, I got my MBA, and plotted my graceful exit out of the technical side. And that’s when I ended up getting into the group that I’m in now. It’s called the I-squad. Did a stint on the early end there, did a stint on the backend.

Things are, I mean, General Mills is nice and open to potential new opportunities in the sense of, I actually, the international group that I was a part of, I pitched that as like, hey, I’m seeing this thing where we do all these really great strategic insights and things like that for the U.S. What if we were going to have it be focused specifically outside? And so my middle kind of route in there, in between the two I-squad stints was like, I was like, I think we could start up a group. And here’s my Jerry Maguire manifesto equivalent. Not quite as dramatic, but it was like, hey, this is the thing. And it ended up landing.

Bill Gullan:

Excellent. Very cool. And so now in your role, long-range planning, ways to expand the business, kind of on-strategy corporate priorities. What’s the remit of your group and what does it include? You’re not attached to specific brands, I would gather. Though you certainly, I’m sure, support them. But could you talk about the purpose of the team that you’re on currently and where that begins and ends?

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, we kind of say that we orbit the giant hairball, in that the gravitational force is enough that it kind of keeps us close and we keep going around, but we’re not necessarily part of the machine. We’re part of a group that’s called disruptive growth. It’s a new thing, part of strategy. But basically we’re a cross-functional internal strategic consultancy. So we’re like a General Mills-specific think tank that basically helps our brands and helps the enterprise grow. On the brand side, we get called in when people have basically chewed on a problem for a bit and maybe haven’t quite figured it out. So maybe something’s in decline, or maybe they see an opportunity for cereal growth in Brazil, or maybe there’s a gnarly question, like why don’t teens want to buy better for you products?

Bill Gullan:

Right, right.

Matt Thell:

Things like that is something that we’d come in from a brand standpoint. And then on the enterprise side, which is this disruptive growth thing, we have our venture capital arm, and we have small scale acquisition, and we have our co-founders, which are internal little startups, groups of two or three. We are, I don’t know, we’re there to help them with front end discovery. So we just bought a pet supplements company. We did a little bit on how to win in the pet supplement space, that was on small-scale acquisition. Co-founders, they need to be directed in a specific way, something at least to start on.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

And so we help them kind of pick a space. Whether it’s digging into picky kids, or dinner fatigue, or whatever those big human problems of food are. And I think we work well. I mean, we generally have a good, high company tenure. We know about the machine, we’re not of the machine. We’re kind of consistent and we’re an external, but a vested party, which works really nicely.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, I’d imagine the combination of skills required to do that, you talk about the multidisciplinary team, obviously there’s a financial analysis and planning piece. There’s a consumer and an insights piece. There’s a sort of R&D food engineering piece. There’s a trend spotting and watching. I mean, it really does take, is that kind of how the team’s broken down, or are you all kind of liberal artsy in that way and love biting those things off?

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, we try and make sure that we have a good mix. And it varies from time to time. We always have people with marketing backgrounds. We for sure have consumer insights background. And at one point in time we had a food anthropologist, which was really nice, but he was also a PhD food scientist. We’ve had technical folks. We like to find interesting people with interesting backgrounds that are kind of maybe misfits within their function at the time, and they’re looking for a change of pace, if they’re going to rotate through, or if they’re more of a misfit, like myself, they just kind of stick around for a bit.

Bill Gullan:

Excellent. Become part of the furniture.

Matt Thell:

Exactly.

Bill Gullan:

Terrific. You mentioned the venture capital and sort of the M&A piece, which I think is interesting and probably distinctive to General Mills, at least to some degree. Could you speak about, I don’t know whether it’s just kind of examples or stories or what does it take to be good at that compared to the more kind of in the pocket, I guess, food science, analyzing where the brands can go? Because that’s, I’d imagine, a fascinating set of questions and topics that you get involved with.

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, what I’d say is we are not the dealmakers. That’s not who our group is. And actually we’re intentionally distanced from that in the sense of, if we knew too much, we would not be able to work with the rest of our portfolio like we do. We would basically be, if we did any type of due diligence or things like that, we would basically be, whatever, tainted. We’d be part of the dirty team and not the clean team.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

So what we do is we try and make sure, if there’s areas that they’re looking into, that we can give them a broader sense of what’s going on and they can take that and use it for specifics.

So I mean, I’ll give you an example. We were looking before at global snacking and stuff like that. This was back in the day. And we decided to do some research on snacking in India. So we, as our group, we are, I’d say, more on, in this sense, more on the qual side. So we’re going and we’re talking to a lot of people. We’re talking to tweens and things like that. And so talked to a bunch of people in their home. Talking to these three girls this one time, mom’s watching from the door, asking about what’s their favorite snack? And she’s like, oh, this potato snack from the vendor down the street, that is the best thing. We’re like, okay, what if? What if all you could have was that snack from that vendor? She’s like, oh my God, I would love that. That would be heaven. I can’t imagine anything better. I’m like, okay. So I’m taking notes and I’m scribbling them down.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

I’m like, okay. What if the only snacks you could have are the snacks that your mom makes? And she’s like, oh. She’s like, that would be hell. She said that with such vehemence. I’m shook. I stop taking notes and the mom now is giving me the stinkeye.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, I’ll bet.

Matt Thell:

And I’m not even doing the interview. This is all happening in Tamil and it’s being translated to me. But while this is happening, the girl who’s nine years old is just, she sees me not writing, and she gets all up in my face and gets my attention of super intense eye contact. And she’s like, note it down. And I was like, huh. Okay. So I’d go and take that down. And so that work itself was to basically do a survey of what was happening in the snacking world in India such that it could be imported into the broader kind of analysis.

Bill Gullan:

Right. And you uncovered some deep cleavages within that family that hopefully did not persist.

Matt Thell:

Seriously. Yeah. And it’s-

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, go ahead.

Matt Thell:

Oh, I was going to say, it’s funny too, you think about, I never have the illusion that I’m an invisible observer, but this is clearly is like, oh, just my presence is being an impact on what’s being studied.

Bill Gullan:

Right. That’s excellent. Yeah, we all have those stories from the road. When it comes to snacking or things more broadly, I think you touched on that a minute ago, obviously there are, there’s a constant swirl of trends and changes and dynamics. It’s new technologies, to the way that channels have evolved with our digital life, to things like dietary preferences, and sort of nutritional disposition, to looming weight-loss medications. I mean, obviously that made big news when Walmart mentioned it in their 10K. How and how does your team stay abreast of trends, and shifting dynamics, and just the natural evolution, and neverending evolution of how things change in people’s minds?

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, part of it, there’s the benefit of being a member of a big company. We have all the resources at our disposal. So I know who the people I can go to for various things. Personally, I mean, it’s clearly not an AI thing and not sophisticated in the slightest, but I’m a pop culture junkie.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Right, right.

Matt Thell:

It doesn’t matter the topic. If it’s part of the zeitgeist, I want to know about it. The guy who started our group, so this was 20 some years back, I remember when I first came in, we had subscriptions to everything. This is what physical periodicals in the group, like, People magazine, Us, that thing, and he was reading a National Inquirer. And I’m like, what are you doing reading the National Inquirer? That’s alien abductions and all this stuff.

Bill Gullan:

Right, right.

Matt Thell:

And he’s like, it’s currently the publication with the largest circulation in the U.S.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Matt Thell:

He’s like, this is what people care about. And so I was like, oh, okay. And he’s like, if we want to know people, we need to know what they care about.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

And so that’s kind of like, I’d say, my direction of whatever’s going on, I want to know what people care about. So I read different news sources, all the aggregators. Serious, trashy, it doesn’t matter. And read the-

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Well, commerce is downstream from all of this.

Matt Thell:

Yeah. I mean, it basically, I’m not saying that I can draw a direct link from what’s going on with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to my current project on holistic margin management, but they’re all the little dots. We use the analogy of pointillism, right?

Bill Gullan:

Right. Sure.

Matt Thell:

So you think about kind of Seurat and his paintings, he’s got all these little dots. I want to gather all those dots and make some sort of complete picture. And yeah, you’ve got to filter out some of the crappy dots. Like, those go away. We call those true but useless. But I figure if all this stuff is kind of swimming around in my head at any given time, sometimes it’s going to coalesce into something useful.

Bill Gullan:

Definitely. And I’m going to resist the temptation to launch into the entire first act of Sunday in the Park with George here.

Matt Thell:

Oh my God.

Bill Gullan:

I don’t think our listeners will appreciate that, as wonderful as it is.

Matt Thell:

Sondheim is having his time. Like, he is coming back.

Bill Gullan:

Well, he is. I just saw Merrily We Roll Along for the first time on stage. Which I know is a show that is thought to be imperfect, but wow, was it great. The cast. If you’re in New York, by all means, go see it. But yeah, he is having a moment. He’s had a 30-year moment, but it’s wonderful to see so much of it.

Matt Thell:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

You talk about trends. I remember us being struck by a project we did for a fashion brand, and somebody who was sort of a veteran was showing us how all of the kind of mainstream fashion trends at the time had been sort of outsider trends 10 years before.

Matt Thell:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

You know, it was like the skate and surf and the punk lifestyles had been kind recycled and brought into the Abercrombie approach. At the time, it was Abercrombie and everything. It’s fascinating how societal movements and trends kind of filter through. And yeah, so I’d imagine that curiosity, and being widely read, and being sort of broadly interested is a tremendous asset to folks who do what you do.

Matt Thell:

Yeah, I mean, everything’s got an origin story. Right?

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Matt Thell:

You just have to dig far enough down. And if you can, like, you talk about the fashion thing. I think about the big line in Devil Wears Prada where basically Meryl Streep starts with the thing that Anne Hathaway is wearing, and then she brings it all the way back to something that happened before. You know?

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Matt Thell:

It’s nice to at least have that soil to dig from as you’re trying to figure things out.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. No doubt, no doubt. You mentioned the role of insights, and obviously that’s comfortable terrain for us, and it’s kind of a rallying cry for this entire podcast, is the insights world and the impact that insights can have in organizations large and small. And given the criticality of that, and that you may be working to address jobs to be done, or consumer needs that might be acknowledged or may not yet be acknowledged, what is the role of insights? And how do you in particular, use insights to support the work of the team?

Matt Thell:

Yeah. What’s nice is I feel like my group is gray enough, gray, in as far as we’re not black and white people, we’re very much gray. And so we’re less concerned about, I’d say, the academic purity of things. I’m more conservative if it gets me something. If a tool is useful, I use it. If it stops being useful, I stop using it. So my big thing is insights without action are just fun facts. They’re just …

Bill Gullan:

Sure.

Matt Thell:

Right? Unless I can do something and translate it. So yeah, we used opportunity maps for a long time, and they helped us and we got good results, and that was nice. And then we turned to jobs theory. Jobs theory seemed to work even better, so we adapted. But really what I’m looking for is I’m looking for what can I get that helps my team focus in a way that they can get good ideas or strategy?

The story that we tell people is, and this came from our chief technical officer, where he’s like, okay, growing up, my grandpa had a farm, we’d go out to the farm, and he always had this pail that had just a bunch of different arrowheads that he found in the field. And he’s like, oh, I want to find an arrowhead. So he goes out and he’d just search around, and he spends whatever, however’s a long time for a small child. An hour.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Matt Thell:

He comes back and he’s like, I didn’t find anything. And Grandpa’s like, okay. He’s like, well, tell me what you did. He’s like, well, I looked here, and I looked here, and I looked here, and I looked here. And he’s like, okay. Here’s what I’m going to do. So he comes up and he takes him outside and he basically takes a stick and he draws a circle around himself. He’s like, I want you to look in this circle. The kid kind of looks in the circle. And then he goes and he does it again. He makes another circle. And he looks in another circle. And does that repeatedly. And he finds one. Which is great.

Bill Gullan:

Neat.

Matt Thell:

And so we use that of like, okay, we are going to give you those circles that allow you to focus. Now, whether that comes from a specific type of map, great. If it’s a job, cool. If it’s an insight, cool. But that type of focus is the thing that we’re looking for with teams and how we work with them. So I like stories. So I’m going to give you a story, if that’s all right.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Sure.

Matt Thell:

So was basically, was doing work in the Middle East and North Africa, and it was all around baking. So we spent all this time doing things like ins and outs of home baking. People use their signature cake as their avatar on social media. Like, oh, that’s so cool. And maybe if they give a recipe to someone, they leave out something so that they can’t recreate it. And oh, it’s a great insight. So we build this jobs map, and felt it was cool. It captured all the different things that were universal, but also specific. So we got this map. And then we’re in Dubai, and sharing it with the team, and we’re talking about how we’re going to use it. And one of the things we wanted to do was a head-to-head review with competition, right? Bake our Betty Crocker cake and have the competition and let’s use this map to identify opportunities.

So we tell the hotel chef. And we’re like, hey, make this Betty Crocker cake, make these other cakes. Just do it as the instructions. Comes down to review, and we go out in the hallway. And it was like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s like multi-layers, and buttercream, and ganache cascading over the top, and all these little delicate chocolate curls. It’s like a work of art. And we’re like, oh, this is great. Thank you so much, but it’s not what we’re looking for. And he’s like … You know. But don’t worry. We know you can do amazing things. And basically his response was like, I don’t care. What would they think? And I’m like, who? I was like, what would who think? He’s the people that come in the hallway and see this. That is a reflection on me and what I can do.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Matt Thell:

And I was like, oh, okay. I was like, well, how about this? What if you just put it in the room, and then no one has to look at it? He’s like, well, what would my assistant think? Or the servers. That that’s okay to leave my kitchen? The thing is, this whole interaction basically became the catalyst of what we ultimately did. It summed it up perfectly, this idea of pride in your work, and exceeding expectations.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Right.

Matt Thell:

And the desire for opulence. So it led to our innovation. It led, it was the key underpinning of our news. All that kind of stuff. So yeah. I had this great jobs math, but in the end it was this one interaction that was the tool that was needed in the moment.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. It’s amazing. Well, and I think we’re always, our industry in general is trying to find ways to not only use, and you talk about jobs, I think one of the limitations, I guess, of that framework is how do you come up with the next thing? Everyone, when we run into executives who don’t appreciate insights, they always quote Steve Jobs. You know, the iPod and everything else wouldn’t have happened in consumer groups. But I mean, to your point, there is a need, probably, to really get into people’s skin and understand how they think, and what are the real drivers of not just unacknowledged needs or needs that aren’t yet met well by one of their options, but what could come next based on how they’re wired, what they believe in.

Matt Thell:

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Constant pursuit it is. So I mean, what an amazing career you’ve had in the work that you do, not only just the countries and the situations and the brands and products that you’ve touched. For those who may be listening who are sort of inspired by that path, and might be thinking about their own, either starting out or starting over or whatever, any sort of words of wisdom or things that have sustained you along the way? You mentioned from early in football practice driving you in a certain direction, and just being kind of the learner you are and the viber you are as it relates to the culture. What are some thoughts about maybe that others might be able to adapt for their own career and professional lives?

Matt Thell:

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I’m expecting that I’ve inspired tens of thousands based off this.

Bill Gullan:

It’s going to … Yes.

Matt Thell:

It’s a conservative estimate, but I am humble, so I will go with that.

Bill Gullan:

Yes. Right, right.

Matt Thell:

I mean, the thing that’s always kind of worked for me, and I had a manager earlier in my career, and it was one of those things where we didn’t necessarily vibe. Like, we’re not going to go out and have beers. But he was a great manager. I really recognized, oh, no, the stuff you’re telling me is amazing. We can’t joke. That’s fine. We’ll do pleasantries when we start. That’s good. That’s socially appropriate. But I realized, but one of the things that he said is, be an expert at something small but useful, and then use it to help someone else, and then basically just continue to build upon that expertise. So for me, I wanted to make the change. I wanted to do international work. But there wasn’t a lot of international stuff happening at General Mills that I could be a part of. But I saw that granola bars were growing, and that we’d need more granola bar capacity. So I’m like, okay, I’m going to be a process expert at granola bars, and I’m going to use that to help developers.

And then something came along where it’s like, okay, we needed to improve some product in Poland. And I’m like, hey, I might not know Poland, but I know process. And I’m not part of your joint venture, but I bet I could do that. So that worked out. And then we had some line going in Argentina, and I was like, well, I’ve done this in the past in another non-US country. I bet I can do it over here, even though I’m not part of your international group. And so then even when I make the career change over to strategy, Häagen-Dazs came out. I’m like, oh, I worked in Europe and South America on kind of stuff like that.

So basically each time, it was taking that little bit of expertise and trying to learn something new in each one. Maybe I’m learning about how to do consumer recruit in India, or maybe I’m trying to figure out how cultural differences apply in channels. And then key to that is helping someone who basically has some sort of important thing, a stake, and maybe some way to help you in the future. So building that kind of expertise roadmap, and thinking about where you want to go and just doing in chunkable steps.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. And you’ve collected experiences along the way.

Matt Thell:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

And I’m sure some of the projects you were given, or tasks that you were working on, may not in and of themselves have been thrilling, but it seems like you extracted a heck of a lot of learning value that put you in good stead for what was to come.

Matt Thell:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Excellent. Well, Matt, we really appreciate your insight and your wisdom. And I talk to students from different places. One of the things I always tell people who are interested in insights or brand as a career is, when you walk through the grocery store and you look to your right and left, try to think back, when you see something new on the shelf, what was it that led to that? What did somebody come to believe that made them defend and maybe isn’t reliable, because some of these are not great ideas, but. And they always, you know, is there anything that a student, let’s say, could read or do or a behavior that they could sort of ingrain that helps them get curious in the right kind of way?

Matt Thell:

I mean, to that end, so to pick up on your thread there, something that’s super easy to do is if a company is good, if a product is good at knowing what they stand for, they’re probably talking about it. And how they talk about it is going to be in different ways. How they talk about it on the package is going to show up in one way. How they talk about it on the website is going to be different. How they talk about it in their advertising. But all of it should distill down to some core nugget that they had that they thought was useful. And so just spending some time, if there’s something that you’re interested in, like a specific product or brand or whatever, just look at what they’re saying. Look at their website. Look at their social feeds. Look at their product. And be like, okay, what is it that they’re trying to say? Because hopefully, again, if they’re smart people and they’re doing it right, it should be coming at you in a super, super clear way.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, sure. And it should be based on some belief about how that product delights people, or solves a problem, or whatever. And I guess those that don’t make it are those that don’t, but-

Matt Thell:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. No, that’s a great thing for people to think through and those who may not be exposed to this world every day or maybe think that these ideas sort of poof out of air and they show up on the shelf and either they succeed or fail, but there’s a lot that lies beneath. And Matt from General Mills is on the strategy team. Thank you for sharing all that lies beneath in your world, and all that you guys do day in day out.

Matt Thell:

Yeah. Thanks. It’s fun chatting.

Bill Gullan:

Thanks to Matt for his time, his insight, his passion. Really appreciated the conversation and gained from it. So thank you, Matt.

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And then thirdly, let’s keep the dialogue going. On Twitter @billgullan or @FinchBrands, or any of the other ways of contact. We love to hear feedback. We love suggestions for future topics and future guests. And if you pursue each of those three ways, or one, or two, or hopefully all three, you will help us make sure that this content is of value to you all now that we’re back doing this monthly with insights and innovation leaders.

We’re excited about Champions of Purposeful Change. We’re excited about this industry, the impact that it has, the ways in which it pioneers methods of data collection, and consumer understanding.

And so thank you for joining us, and we will sign off from the Cradle of Liberty.

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