Grupo Bimbo: Bread Meets AI
As Lead Product Designer for Grupo Bimbo’s ION platform, I drove the transformation of a legacy enterprise tool into a modern, user-centric, AI-first solution spanning manufacturing, logistics, and field operations.
Leading the effort from concept through implementation, the work reduced ordering and adjustment time by 40%, improved product freshness, and supported scalable growth across thousands of routes in the U.S. and Mexico.
Client
Grupo Bimbo
Type
Product Design
Year
2022 - 2025
Process
Overview
Who is Grupo Bimbo?
Grupo Bimbo is the world’s largest baked goods company, with over 100 brands across 33 countries. In the U.S., Bimbo Bakeries USA produces 20+ well-known bakery brands, from Sara Lee and Entenmann’s to Thomas’ English Muffins to a variety of popular niche or regional brands.
Project Background
Grupo Bimbo’s legacy ordering platform had grown inefficient and confusing for frontline workers, impacting profitability, product freshness, and growth. The redesign delivered a streamlined, data-driven, AI/ML enhanced experience that simplified decision-making for frontline teams.
Problem & Goals
User needs
A simple and focused UI that surfaces only the information needed to make the next decision for frontline workers.
Clear calls to action that guide users toward “good” orders rather than forcing them to guess.
Ability to quickly navigate through routes, stores, and products with clear prioritization.
Business needs
Improve product freshness, and growth, and reduce waste without slowing growth or adding headcount.
Reduce order errors and rework, cutting order-entry time by roughly 40–50% per route.
Embed AI/ML directly into the ordering page so predictive insights are part of the flow.
Challenges
Understanding the User
When I joined Antuit, feature concepts had been validated, but there were no defined personas for ION’s frontline or contract users. I quickly realized that without a clear understanding of who we were designing for. Along with their routes, store patterns, and device constraints the experience would fall short.
I advocated with leadership to engage directly with frontline users, and Grupo Bimbo made it possible. Over the course of the project, I traveled across over 10 states, visited 15 distribution centers and met with over 40 participants, leading in-depth field research to define frontline personas through ride-alongs, manager interviews, and platform data analysis. These insights anchored the product in real-world contexts and operational realities, providing a strong foundation for the redesign.
Addressing UX Issues
Smoothing out the experience
Before I joined, the first version of ION, a new tool for creating and adjusting frontline orders, featured a strong analytical engine but a user interface (see second screen above) that both leadership and frontline teams found difficult to navigate and overwhelming with information. I redefined the experience around the principle of “make it easy to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong thing,” streamlining core workflows and integrating AI in ways that enhanced, rather than complicating, the user experience.
Decoupling user tasks
Originally, multiple tasks, such as route review, store selection, product review, and adjustments were packed into a single dense page, overwhelming users. Partnering with leadership, I redesigned the flow using a funnel approach, guiding users from route to store and into product-level details page. This reduced cognitive load, improved clarity, and created flexibility to introduce AI and features over time.
Collaborating with key users
I partnered with an internal panel of managers who supported frontline teams, leveraging their day-to-day experience to guide and validate UX decisions. Combined with frequent usability testing, this feedback loop enabled rapid improvements while ensuring every change reflected real-world workflows. Key insights and outcomes were regularly shared with Antuit and Grupo Bimbo’s leadership team meetings.
Outcomes
Final Solution
The redesigned ION experience delivered measurable improvements:
35% reduction in frontline user errors, improving accuracy and confidence in daily operations.
40% increase in ION freshness company-wide, driven by clearer workflows and stronger adoption.
A scalable design system that reinforced visual hierarchy and built trust in AI recommendations, helping users quickly identify and resolve high-priority issues.
A simplified ordering process with fewer screens and clearer steps, cutting redundant interactions and minimizing error risk.
New overview pages that surface route and store health at a glance, enabling proactive action before deep analysis.
A strengthened information architecture supporting progressive complexity, making it easier to scale ION across future technologies and diverse frontline roles.
Morgan Smith, Vice President of the Direct Store Delivery (DSD) Center of Excellence, shared that more than 20,000 employees, from bakers to DSD drivers, now find it easier to deliver exactly what baked‑goods consumers want.
Reflection
Organizational Change and technology
Grupo Bimbo was set out to shift behavior for their frontline users to use AI to make informed decisions, but the real unlock came from framing ION as a tool that supports frontline success and company health, rather than as a top‑down mandate. Initially, ION faced low adoption and skepticism among frontline users, by when began aligning the UX with frontline realities, top down, and clearly showing how the tool protected earnings and reduced waste, ION evolved from an obstacle into a trusted co‑pilot for daily decisions for both the frontline users and leadership.
Empathy and evidence
This was the most user testing I had led on a single project in my entire career. Traveling over 9 states, meeting over 45 frontline users. I was consistently using the insights to speak for frontline users in leadership forums. I created an archetype document to help management internalize the realities of frontline work at scale and paired those qualitative insights with data from Grupo Bimbo’s analytics team. The archetype document was a great communication tool for leadership to understand their workers. That combination of qualitative research and quantitative pattern analysis gave me the evidence needed to validate hypotheses, prioritize features, and make design trade‑offs that moved both user experience and business outcomes.
Discover how Zebra Technologies made a measurable impact on Grupo Bimbo.
