Maria Almenara is Peru’s first data-driven pastry shop. Established in 2007, the medium-sized company sells artisanal home-made pastries. Operating both in-store and through a robust online presence, they cover demand for fresh pastries within the entire capital in less than 15 minutes. Digital tools and thorough data analysis not only facilitated business expansion and formalisation but also played a key role in attracting top talents. Moreover, by deploying a range of tools that are integrated with ERP software they improved daily lives of their employees and customers – from digital totems to make quick orders in shops, to machine learning to predict daily demand, to AI to bridge skill gaps.
Peru’s first data-driven pastry shop scales up business operations with digital technologies
Abstract
Background
In Peru, one out of ten families has a member that produces pastries as a contribution to economic self-sufficiency of their families, says Carlos Armando de la Flor, general manager of the company Maria Almenara. More than 30 years ago, his wife Maria Almenara was one of those women. From her early years, a passion for artisanal home-made pastries took root. Fast forward to 2007, Maria and her husband Carlos Armando established the company Maria Almenara. Their good reputation spread: In 2009 an American multinational chain of coffee houses called and offered to sell the company’s products – a first important step to accelerate their growth.
Today, after 16 years in business, Maria Almenara is Peru’s first data-driven pastry shop and ranks among the fastest-growing in the country. So far, the company has 421 employees and two lines of business – one B2B line selling white label pastries to other shops– and since 2017 another B2C line with now 15 pastry shops in Lima.
Digitalisation Path and Approach
Maria Almenara is a digital native company that embraced the use of digital technologies since starting business operations. From 2008, a simple credit card reader accelerated the company’s growth process by replacing a payment system predominantly based on cash transactions and recording of debt until customers would be able to pay – overall tripling the sales of the pastry shop.
Following this initial step, the company grew fueled by Maria’s passion for home-made pastries and Carlos’ curiosity for technologies. While the use of digital tools takes a facilitating role, at the core of deploying any kind of technology lies the founders’ strong scale-up mentality driving towards the establishment of a global high-impact company:
“When we opened the first store in 2017, operational processes needed to be designed with the perspective of scalability, not just to solve specific issues of one store, but for the entire process. Today, when improving one process we don’t think of 50 shops, but of 100 in three different countries”, says Carlos.
An Entreprise Ressource Planning System (ERP), introduced in 2015, serves as the main tool to manage the company’s processes. It allows the company to oversee their entire value chain from acquiring input resources through the transformation into products to the final customer billing – facilitating measurement of productivity. Consequently, it improved predictability and prevented a persistent sense of short-term urgency.
Digitialisation to boost productivity and facilitate formalisation
The majority of SMEs in Peru do not use an ERP system. Peru’s economy is characterised by few large firms with high labour productivity coexisting with a large low-productivity informal sector with a particularly large difference in productivity between large and small firms. High costs of formality are a key factor leading to a particularly large informal sector employing around 75% of all workers (OECD, 2023[1]). Maria Almenara stands as a good example how the use of digital technologies can enable productivity, formalisation and attraction of talented workforce.
A point-of-sale system recording and communicating all customer transactions to the ERP, established after the opening of the first store, enabled and simplified formalised accounting. Behind this system lies a customer data platform which gathers over 20.000 interactions per month from both physical customer transactions and digital transactions from the company’s online shop which amounts to 40% of overall sales. In addition to information on the location and time of purchase, certain interactions provide extra details, such as the purpose of the purchase, such as birthdays or special occasions. Assembling all transaction data in a single point facilitates the analysis of different customer profiles and development of commercial strategies accordingly.
Further, amid the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company strategically diversified its sales channels, including the introduction of mixed shop formats of in-store consumption, takeout, pick-up and delivery. A major advantage of digitally assembling and analysing data on purchases lies in improved planning of customer demand. As of today, Maria Almenara is able to deliver on online orders in up to 15 minutes to any location within Lima planning to further expedite the delivery process. In 2024, 10 additional shops are planned, strategically positioned based on the data analysis of customer demand.
Experimentation with innovative tools
Maria Almenara not only bases their decisions on data, but consistently explores innovative technologies to enhance their processes, a key factor contributing to their multiple award-winning success such as the winning of Grand Prize for Entrepreneurial Creativity 2023 and the prize for customer service for their project of transformation of so-called phygital stores. This format of stores caters a digital experience in-person through a digital attention totem which allows customers to order and receive their desired product in less than 5 minutes.
Another pillar of the company’s mission lies in their human-centered approach, starting with their own workforce. Smart use of digital tools serving the employees and giving them more flexibility is one factor that makes the company particularly successful in reducing employee turnover. For example, in recognising the educational challenges faced by young individuals in Peru, the company prioritised developing their workforce’s soft skills while leveraging artificial intelligence to handle quantitative skills tasks such as planning demand and projections for sales to alleviate stress associated with such tasks.
Harnessing a company culture of data-based decision-making, the company actively engages in the realm of artificial intelligence. This is illustrated by their development of a mathematical model to estimate demand and facilitate production planning, after they had realized that sales are predictable to a large extent due to changes in demand according to the day of the week, the bi-monthly day of salary payments, holidays, and even temperature changes. In a related project collaboration with the MIT, they delved into the use of machine learning to strategically forecast sales, while considering production and storage capacity constraints in the equation.
Ecosystem Support
The company gradually developed their network of partners – one of them a leading global community of high-impact entrepreneurs. Being part of this network provides services related to access to capital and markets, but the most crucial service for the company lies in gaining access to talent through a network of global mentors and valuable academic partners such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and INSEAD.
While the government provides various programmes for micro and small enterprises, there is currently a gap in support for medium-sized companies. Nevertheless, the company benefitted from a government loan during the Covid-19 pandemic, which played a crucial role in keeping the business operational. Maria Almenara believes in the meaningful impact created through the collaboration between private sector, academia and the government. Thus, they actively engage in government initiatives, not just as recipients of benefits but as contributors that act as sounding board and motivators towards the market.
To learn more about SMEs digital transformation
OECD (2021), The Digital Transformation of SMEs, OECD Studies on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/bdb9256a-en.
OECD (2021), SME Digitalisation to Build Back Better, https://doi.org/10.1787/f493861e-en
References
[1] OECD (2023), OECD Economic Surveys: Peru 2023, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/081e0906-en.
