CPG Giants Join FourKites Board to Tackle Supply Chain Disruption

CHICAGO, IL – December 18, 2025 – In a significant move to deepen its industry-specific expertise, AI-driven supply chain platform FourKites has assembled a powerhouse advisory board of executives from the world's largest Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies. The new board, featuring leaders from PepsiCo, Unilever, Kraft Heinz, and The Campbell’s Company, signals a strategic pivot toward collaborative, AI-powered solutions aimed at solving the sector's most complex and persistent challenges.

This initiative formalizes a partnership between a leading technology provider and the CPG titans who navigate the daily pressures of getting products onto store shelves and into consumer hands. With a collective 200 years of supply chain experience, the nine-member board is tasked with providing direct strategic guidance on FourKites’ product development, helping to shape the next generation of tools for an industry grappling with unprecedented volatility.

"Launching our first Customer Advisory Board with leading CPG executives formalizes our commitment to customer-centric innovation," said Mathew Elenjickal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FourKites, in the announcement. "This collaborative approach ensures we continue delivering solutions that address the unique needs of consumer packaged goods supply chains."

A Strategic Alliance in a Volatile Sector

The formation of this board is not merely a corporate exercise; it is a direct response to the immense strain on CPG supply chains. The industry faces a perfect storm of challenges: fluctuating consumer demand driven by social media trends and economic uncertainty, the logistical nightmare of omni-channel fulfillment, and the critical need for cold chain integrity for perishable goods. These pressures are compounded by labor shortages, inflationary costs, and the constant threat of global disruptions, from port congestion to geopolitical events.

By embedding top-tier CPG leaders into its innovation process, FourKites aims to move beyond generic solutions and build technology that is purpose-built for these specific pain points. The board is chaired by Scott DeGroot, Managing Director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee and a former Kimberly-Clark executive, who brings a blend of academic rigor and real-world operational experience.

"This advisory board brings together industry leaders who understand the unique challenges facing consumer goods companies today," said DeGroot. "Together, we'll help shape technology solutions that drive measurable improvements across the entire CPG ecosystem."

Other members include influential executives from Essity, Kimberly-Clark, SC Johnson, and Conagra, representing a significant cross-section of the industry. Their mandate is clear: provide intelligence on emerging challenges, validate use cases, and offer strategic feedback on feature prioritization to ensure the technology directly translates to operational resilience and efficiency.

Beyond Visibility: The Push Towards AI-Driven Orchestration

This move also underscores FourKites' strategic evolution from a pioneer of real-time transportation visibility to a leader in end-to-end supply chain orchestration. While the company built its reputation on tracking shipments in real time—a capability that earned it consistent recognition as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms—its focus has shifted toward a more ambitious goal: automating supply chain action.

This evolution is centered on its Intelligent Control Tower®, a platform that creates a real-time digital twin of a company's entire supply chain, encompassing orders, shipments, and inventory. This holistic view is then activated by a team of AI-powered "digital workers" designed to automate complex workflows. These AI agents can handle tasks like scheduling carrier appointments, collecting documents, and managing customer service inquiries 24/7, freeing human teams to focus on high-value exceptions.

Recent evaluations from industry analysts like Nucleus Research have validated this direction, recognizing the platform's strength as an "execution-centric" control tower that can analyze disruptions and model their financial impact in real time. The tangible benefits of this AI-first approach were demonstrated in a pilot with US Cold Storage, where a digital worker transformed the appointment scheduling process, achieving an 87% success rate and handling over 150 appointments simultaneously—a task that would have been impossible through sequential manual processing.

A Customer-Centric Blueprint for Innovation

While many technology companies host user conferences or maintain general advisory councils, FourKites' decision to create a vertical-specific board for CPG marks a more targeted approach to customer engagement. The company has long leveraged its IdeaExchange platform, where 90% of its active users share suggestions, leading to over 250 new features. The CPG advisory board represents a formal, strategic extension of this philosophy, elevating the collaboration from feature requests to foundational product strategy.

This model aims to close the gap between technological capability and on-the-ground reality. By having direct, unfiltered access to the strategic thinking of leaders from companies like PepsiCo and Unilever, FourKites can ensure its AI models and digital workers are trained to solve the right problems. The board will help prioritize the development of solutions that address the nuanced demands of CPG, such as optimizing for short product lifecycles, managing complex promotional schedules, and advancing sustainability goals through more efficient logistics.

This deep collaboration is designed to produce more than just incremental improvements. It is a concerted effort to co-create a new operational playbook for the CPG industry, one where data from across the supply chain is not just visible but actionable and automated. As supply chains become more interconnected and fragile, the ability to proactively orchestrate a response to disruption, rather than reactively track it, is becoming the key competitive differentiator. By uniting top CPG minds with advanced AI, FourKites and its new partners are betting they can build the resilient and responsive supply chains of the future.