Ready for the Future? CPGs Can’t Overlook the Importance of a Modern Tech Infrastructure

The MACH definition represents guideposts for digital brand teams to follow when building a more flexible and modern tech stack.

Technology is playing a pivotal role in how consumer goods brands see their businesses growing in the years to come. Brands are increasing IT budgets — and it’s not just because of AI. 

Of course, AI will have a dramatic impact on how CPGs evolve. But before companies can get to the point of implementing this ground-breaking technology, they must first put in place a modern tech infrastructure to succeed in a highly disruptive and competitive landscape. 

Implementing a flexible, composable, and future-ready IT tech stack is essential to guaranteeing brand success, and ensuring CPGs are more operationally sustainable, innovative, and resilient. The question is how?

CPGs are Budgeting for MACH Technology

According to a study by IBM and the Consumer Goods Forum, more than a third of consumer goods leaders said they are increasing IT budgets, aiming toward more efficient and sustainable use of technology. 

Similarly, a global study by MACH Alliance found that nearly 40% of companies in consumer goods manufacturing are dedicating a portion of their IT budgets toward becoming more composable. 

The Alliance is a not-for-profit body that supports education around MACH principles and how companies can implement more composable IT frameworks. MACH is defined as:

• Microservices or the use of solutions and individual components that are independently developed and managed
• API-first or the implementation of solutions that leverage functionality through an API connection
• Cloud-native SaaS or tools that live in the cloud and function beyond storage and hosting, and automatically update and scale results in the cloud
• Headless or ensuring the front-end digital experience and consumer-facing presentation are decoupled from back-end programming language and frameworks.

The definition represents guideposts for digital brand teams to follow when building a more flexible and modern tech stack. 

When developing an IT infrastructure designed around these four key principles, brands are no longer locked into one solution provider. Instead, brands can select best-of-breed solutions for various needs. For example, a CPG brand can work with one vendor for their content management system (CMS) and a completely different vendor to manage their product information management (PIM) optimization. By leveraging API-first solutions, varying composable tools are easily able to work together.