The Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC) has selected Centric Software's Centric PLM platform to consolidate product lifecycle management across its five-brand global portfolio, with the goal of accelerating innovation and tightening regulatory compliance in more than 80 countries.
TMICC's brand stable — Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto, Wall's (Heartbrand), and Talenti — represents one of the broadest footprints in the global frozen-dessert category. Managing that scale across divergent regional regulatory regimes, packaging requirements, and retail channel expectations has historically demanded significant coordination overhead. The PLM selection is intended to collapse that complexity into a single connected workflow.
The Platform Case
Centric PLM was chosen following a formal vendor selection process in which TMICC evaluated the platform's food-and-beverage-specific capabilities, its scalability across global operations, and its end-to-end product lifecycle coverage — from formula development and nutritional labeling through packaging, supplier collaboration, and commercialization. The company cited a need to bring R&D, packaging, quality, and regulatory affairs teams into one operating environment, reducing the data-fragmentation risk that accompanies multi-market launches.
Zbigniew Lewicki, Chief RD&I Officer of The Magnum Ice Cream Company, said the integration of cross-functional teams onto one platform represents "an important step forward," adding that greater lifecycle visibility from early development through commercialization was a core objective. Centric Software's proprietary benchmarks suggest deployments of this type can deliver up to a 50% productivity improvement and a 60% reduction in time to market, though TMICC has not disclosed its own performance targets.
Broader CPG and Foodservice Context
The deployment reflects a wider push among large consumer-packaged-goods companies to modernize product development infrastructure. In a supply-chain environment still marked by ingredient-cost volatility and shifting label-compliance mandates — particularly across the European Union and select Asia-Pacific markets — real-time data visibility across the product lifecycle has become a competitive differentiator rather than a back-office function.
For foodservice operators and distributors that carry TMICC brands, faster commercialization cycles can translate into more reliable LTO cadences and quicker reformulation responses when commodity inputs shift. Ice cream's reliance on dairy, cocoa, and specialty inclusions makes it particularly sensitive to formulation agility — a capability that a unified PLM environment is designed to support.
Centric Software, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes, positions its platform specifically for fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers, including food and beverage producers and foodservice suppliers. The TMICC agreement adds one of the category's highest-profile global operators to its client base, alongside grocery and multi-category retail accounts.
The partnership signals continued investment by large CPG food companies in digital transformation infrastructure — a trend that supply-chain technology coverage here at Foodservice News has tracked across multiple segments, and one that connects directly to the innovation pipelines driving frozen-dessert category growth at both retail and foodservice channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
