Did Kraft Heinz Take a Strategic Page From the Spotify Playbook?

What does Spotify have to do with Kraft-Heinz? Before you guess, I’ll give you a hint, it has nothing to do with new remix of Nigerian dancehall recording artist Ketchup by DJ Mustard. Odds are when you think about the music streaming and podcasting company Spotify, you don’t easily connect it with the almost 150-year-old CPG conglomerate The Kraft Heinz Company, the owner of iconic food and beverage CPG brands, including namesakes Kraft & Heinz, Oscar Meyer, Kool-Aid, Jell-O, Lunchables, Planters, and Maxwell House Coffee. In all, they own around 100 global brands that sell in more than 50 individual fragmented CPG product categories. The problem lies in the fact that in recent years, CPG products have become increasingly harder to fit into a categorical silo. Within massive companies like The Kraft Heinz Company that creates problems when you are trying to allocate resources to manage each separate product category in the most effective and efficient way. So, what does this have to do with Spotify exactly? While Spotify likely doesn’t know the first thing about categorical differences in shelf-stable dressings and their refrigerated counterparts, they have faced a similar issue in their own business. Spotify brilliantly attacked this problem by taking the original content-based category approach, which are grouped by genres or language or geographical boundaries and changed it to context-based groupings. Will this also work for The Kraft Heinz Company?