In November 2022, iFood was elected one of the ten most innovative companies in the country by Forbes magazine, which made this selection in partnership with organizations and experts focused on innovation, such as Endeavor, Parque Tecnológico São José dos Campos and Porto Digital.
And its VP of strategy and finance, Diego Barreto, explains the formula to get there: investing in a tripod of culture, vision and technology. “Our first pillar of innovation It's the culture. We don’t believe in innovation that isn’t carried out in the company as a whole”, says the executive.
The second pillar, he continues, is vision. “Innovation must be the result of a series of initiatives to get somewhere”, says Diego. And the third is, of course, technology — which is always used to solve problems in a way that had not been thought of before.
To create innovative and surprising solutions, we also have many experts in the field. More than half of iFood's employees are engineers and data scientists. Together, they have already developed more than a hundred models of artificial intelligence, which have been running at the company since 2019.
On a daily basis, the company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (machine learning) to, for example, make the most attractive offer to customers, and at the right time.
Much more than delivery
In this way, iFood reaches 2022 with 300 thousand partner establishments and delivering 65 million orders per month in 1,700 cities in Brazil —always with innovations to showcase. “We do something unique in Latin America, and that few companies in the world do, which is a last mile in very little time and at an affordable price”, says Diego.
The news goes beyond food delivery. In 2021, iFood started to operate with supermarket deliveries, pharmacies and pet stores. This year, it is testing a model that involves other stores and B2B deliveries. Not to mention the Electric motorcycle, launched in partnership with Voltz, which is being sold to delivery drivers.
For Diego, in a company with this level of complexity, the secret to innovating is not having rigid rules or confining creativity to one department. “It's absurd to create a bunch of policies in the company and want to talk about innovation. With a lot of politics, the person is just playing by the rules. What I want are people who understand the context. And then act”, he says.
Read too
- “The data driven culture is at the center of iFood’s innovation”
- CASE 2022: Innovate in times of recession
- Where and how iFood uses artificial intelligence
- New Economy: how the data driven model is applied in companies
- Why embracing chaos is the secret to surviving the future
