3 min read
Columbia Road has been a long-term partner to Kespro, supporting the commercialisation and sustained growth of their expanding portfolio of digital services. Through a dedicated and data-led approach, we have helped Kespro bring their ambitious digital vision to life, ensuring effective go-to-market execution, strong service adoption, and sustained customer engagement.
Starting point: Building the foundation for industry transformation through digital services
Kespro, Finland's leading wholesaler for the foodservice sector, is on a mission to transform the restaurant and foodservice industry. Their ambition is to move beyond the role of a traditional food distributor and become a true strategic partner, offering digital tools and services that empower restaurants and other foodservice organisations to operate more efficiently and profitably.
At the heart of this transformation is a vision to uplift the industry as a whole, helping restaurants across Finland become more resilient and successful through innovative digital solutions. Kespro sees digitalisation not as a trend, but as a means to fundamentally renew the foodservice industry and help their customers thrive. By making everyday operations easier and more profitable for restaurants, Kespro aims to redefine the role of a wholesaler into that of a growth enabler for the entire industry.
To bring this vision to life, Kespro made significant investments in developing a range of digital services tailored to their customers' operational needs.
However, launching these services successfully required new capabilities in commercialisation and customer engagement, areas in which Kespro had limited experience. Recognising the need for a trusted partner to bridge this gap, they turned to Columbia Road. We joined the journey at a pivotal stage: the services were ready to go live, but adoption among end-users had yet to begin.
Our approach: Turning a bold vision into measurable growth through cross-functional collaboration
We took an integrated, data-driven approach tailored to Kespro's unique situation as a digital newcomer in a traditional industry. We worked closely with Kespro's marketing, sales, customer service, and service development teams to bring the services to market and increase their usage.
Key elements of our approach included:
- Go-to-market (GTM) strategy definition: We clarified business goals, key performance indicators, and the service's value proposition. We also identified our core target audiences and developed a comprehensive marketing plan across all channels.
- Creative concept development: We crafted a cohesive creative concept that translated across multiple customer touchpoints, from paid advertising and social media to printed flyers and event visibility.
- Continuous growth experimentation: From day one, we ran iterative growth activities, A/B tests, and marketing experiments to identify what drove awareness and conversions, and scaled only what worked.
- Cross-functional collaboration: We established a cross-functional growth team to drive shared goals, ideated and prioritised activities using impact-effort evaluation, managed an active backlog, and continuously analysed results to capture key learnings.
- Design-driven thinking: A dedicated designer supported the project to ensure a consistent customer perspective throughout all communications and service development.
- Martech and automation expertise: Led by a Columbia Road growth owner, we implemented and refined marketing automation campaigns that supported onboarding and engagement.
The result was a truly multichannel, measurable and customer-centric marketing approach that laid the groundwork for long-term service growth.
Impact: Embedding long-term commercial capabilities and accelerating service adoption at scale
Within the first year, the majority of target users had adopted the first one of the new digital services launched, an outstanding outcome for a first-time digital product launch in the wholesale food sector.
Key impacts included:
- Successful go-to-market strategy and concept: A clear, repeatable framework for future service commercialisation.
- High service adoption and awareness: Strong engagement and uptake among Kespro’s existing customers.
- Scalable growth capabilities: The formation of a dedicated growth team proved so valuable that Kespro decided to double down and establish a second growth team and widen the scope of the growth teams, making them even more strategic for Kespro’s long-term growth.
- Qualitative impact: In retrospective sessions, Kespro leadership highlighted the growth team’s role as "extremely valuable to our business."
- Go-to-market playbook: A practical guide now exists to support future digital service launches across Kespro’s portfolio.
Project highlights
- Launch of the first digital service with the majority of users onboarded within a year.
Ongoing collaboration in growth hacking and new customer acquisition. - A high-trust partnership with Kespro's senior leadership, including Marketing Director Karri Gardemeister and Service Business Lead Taiju Jaatinen.
- Transition from single-team experimentation to multiple growth squads embedded in the business.