You may not immediately think of XR technologies when you think of Nestlé, who are more likely to conjure the idea of milk chocolate and bottled water. But their immersive technology lead Richard Hess drops by to explain how even a food company like Nestlé can benefit from embracing emerging tech, on the 100th episode of the XR for Business podcast. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking with Richard Hess, the immersive experience lead at the massive multi-national Nestlé, making a billion products a year. A day, he said, but I don’t know, a lot of products. You have them on your shelf, you have them in your fridge. We’re gonna be speaking with Rich about Nestlé’s VR and AR efforts in marketing, sales, enterprise solutions, and training. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Rich, welcome to the show, my friend. Richard: Hey, Alan. Thanks for having me. Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You and I have spent a lot of time kind of talking over the phone, but also spending some time on a panel at AWB. Richard: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, we’ve crossed paths a few times. I’m just happy to be here, to talk a little bit about what we’re doing at Nestlé. Alan: We’re super excited. Why don’t you make an introduction to you, and what you’re doing in XR with Nestlé? Richard: Sure. So for myself, I’ve been with Nestlé for about 10 years now. First based out of the US, working for our waters division there. Mostly supporting digital marketing on the technology side. If you go back 10 years ago, the mobile phone was becoming big, people were starting looking at social media as a way to communicate. Through that journey around three years ago, spent about a year in San Francisco, starting with our innovation outpost that we have out there, looking at emerging technologies. And that’s kind of where I gained a passion for augmented/virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, whatever kind of acronym comes in the space there. Alan: Realities? All the Rs? Richard: All the realities. Yeah. [laughs] Alan: I actually wrote an article — you can find it on LinkedIn — it’s called “The ABCs of R”. Richard: Oh yeah, there we go. That’s good, I got to take a look at that. But yeah, that’s when I started getting a bit more hands on from my under the organization of getting “Okay, I’ve seen a lot of tangible use cases.” And around a little more than two years ago I came over here to Barcelona, where Nestlé has set up this global digital hub, that was mostly — at the time — looking more marketing and sales focused on how do we build centralized global platforms, and products, and services that can serve all of our markets and brands across the world, but now is more holistic across all different use cases, whether it’s in the factories, supply chain, HR etc. It’s kind of looking across the whole spectrum. So the past two to three years or so, I’ve been looking at augmented/virtual reality in that way of how do we take all these little different one-off experiences that we’ve done. And when we see a lot of tangible value in leveraging these technologies, we try to bring them to scale in something that is a full industrialized product, that the rest of the organization can take advantage of. Alan: Let’s give an example of one that you did a pilot, you realized the success of it and now you’re going– Richard: Well, I think a really good example — and when you think about, it’s a very simple one — but what we used for augmented reality within a sales organization was using AR as a tool in the sales person’s toolbox. So we have a brand called Nestlé Pro...