Kraft Heinz Connects 8,000+ Machines via Azure Digital Twins for Autonomous Manufacturing

Kraft Heinz, one of the world's largest food companies with $26 billion in annual revenue and 36,000 employees, has been building an AI-driven manufacturing transformation over 4.5 years. The company connected more than 8,000 machines across its North American network using Azure IoT Operations, handling 50+ different communication protocols. Azure IoT Operations provides a unified data plane at the edge running on Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters, handling protocol translation, data normalization, MQTT brokering, and routing. The company built over 3,000 use cases on top of this data foundation. Kraft Heinz follows a four-step maturity model: Paperless Operations (digitizing shop floor information), Recommendations (ML-generated shift guidance), Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, and Touchless Manufacturing (machines executing recommendations automatically without operator approval). The company is actively pushing toward fully autonomous production lines, with the digital twin targeting three OEE domains: machine performance, yield, and utilities consumption. Kraft Heinz operates more than 70 factories globally managing 200 brands and 5,000 SKUs.