Logistics must flow flawlessly when Greenfood provides Sweden's grocery stores, restaurants and hotels with fresh healthy food. Greenfood is at the forefront of digital development and as they innovate, the focus has been on using technology to create better conditions and opportunities for their core business.
The passion for making fresh healthy food tastier, more sustainable and more accessible has made Greenfood a leading European player in the market. The business is divided into three key areas: Fresh Produce handles seasonal products both locally and globally and provides shops, hotels, restaurants and catering operations throughout Europe, with fresh fruit, berries, spices and vegetables. Food Solutions provides everything from cut fruits and vegetables, grain mixes and pasta mixes, to consumer-packaged salads, wraps and smoothies. Its customers include grocery stores, service retailers, restaurant chains and suppliers to hotels and restaurants.
Greenfood's third business area, Picadeli, provides Europe and the USA with commercial, self-serve salad bars. The successful salad concept can be found in over 2,000 service and grocery stores. Josef Wellmarker, Greenfood Group's IT Manager, is responsible for extending Picadeli's digital progress to the other business areas. There is a difference in the technological maturity between Picadeli and the other business areas that are more production-oriented.
Josef says: "Our aim is to evolve our degree of digitalization in all business areas, and this also includes areas such as IT infrastructure and cyber security.”
The importance of IT for retail
For Greenfood's vision of health food to be realized, fresh fruit and vegetables must always be available. Even in outdoor urban areas, logistics are important.
"We work to make fresh healthy food accessible, tasty and affordable. In order to succeed in reaching out to the end consumer, the underlying logistics must work so that the food remains fresh all the way to the point of sale,” Josef says.
IT infrastructure is vital for the products to get through the logistics chain on time. In fresh produce, there is no room for production delays.
"When the products enter the warehouse, they must be redistributed quickly as we work with fresh food with a short shelf life. We can't stop for a week and then proceed with sales," explains the IT manager.
The need for help to secure production
Greenfood needed to identify a competent partner to bolster its IT security, and Onevinn was the clear choice. Greenfood selected Onevinn based upon its award-winning and global recognition as a leading Microsoft Partner and Managed Security Service Provider, with security in its DNA. Greenfood’s first step was to conduct an initial threat analysis with Onevinn.
"Greenfood is a highly digitalized company. This is especially true for its core business that handles fresh produce. First, we made a change around security and zero trust, which led to a positive impact, because the group consists of many companies. We needed to streamline across the business units,” explains Olov. In his role as Cloud Security Success Manager at Onevinn, Olov helps customers streamline their IT environments with security and compliance in focus.
"Conducting regular and comprehensive analysis is extremely important to us, as developments are happening at lightning speed. New opportunities are opening up for us as a company, but they can also present potential risks," says Greenfood's Josef Wellmarker.
Being part of a collaboration with Onevinn has given Greenfood's IT department a new perspective.
"We must work in a structured way on our IT risk management. We must take inventory, analyze and mitigate our IT risks dynamically to protect our business,” Josef explains.
Onevinn MDR works 24/7 for Greenfood
The collaboration to secure Greenfood's IT environment has unlocked a range of new services for implementation. The most significant new implementation is Onevinn's MDR service, which now monitors all of Greenfood's clients, servers, networks and cloud services. It's a so-called Managed Security Service built on Microsoft Sentinel (SIEM/SOAR platform in Azure) alongside Microsoft Defender 365.
With Onevinn MDR (Managed Detection and Response), organisations benefit from 24/7 security monitoring and response. “Our services differ from traditional monitoring because we not only passively monitor, but also respond to problems as they arise,” says Stefan Schörling, Head of MDR at Onevinn.
Another important security objective for Greenfood is to ensure round-the-clock staffing to monitor the company’s alarms. In addition to monitoring and responding to incidents, Onevinn takes proactive measures to make its customers safer through MDR.
"MDR is a type of scanning that involves us continuously looking for vulnerabilities in the environment. We do this because time sensitivity is key when working with fresh foods. The inventory has to keep moving without any IT-related business interruptions," says Olov.
A partnership for the future
As a technology-forward company, Greenfood views its partnership with Onevinn as critical to their supply chain resilience.
“We previously had an operating partner performing a similar service, but it was important for us to bring in a third-party expert to audit and improve our existing IT operations,” says Josef Wellmarker at Greenfood. Greenfood values the independent review from Onevinn over the simplicity of in-house solutions:
"We considered team dynamics when deciding to bring on a new vendor, and I think we have arrived at very sensible routines and communication channels that make it easy to collaborate," he continues.
Onevinn and the operating company have a regular cadence of communication, and now that Onevinn is embedded in the IT operations of Greenfood, the company has the security and awareness needed to scale into the future.
Olov Norman concludes: "Greenfood has made transformative progress by shifting from its legacy, reactive IT environment to a become a proactive and truly modern enterprise.”
You can read the post published by Microsoft in Swedish: https://pulse.microsoft.com/sv-se/work-productivity-sv-se/retail-sv-se/fa1-onevinn-mdr-hjalper-greenfood-dygnet-runt-med-proaktiv-sakerhet/
Read More about Onevinn MDR here: https://www.onevinn.com/mdr