Customer Story
CostaFoods Brazil
How CostaFoods Brasil Closed the Strategy-to-Execution Gap
CostaFoods Brasil is a Brazilian producer, processor, and distributor of food products operating across domestic and export markets.
The company's origins trace to the interior of Minas Gerais, in the city of São Sebastião do Oeste, where what began two decades ago as a family enterprise has grown into a group with national reach and an international footprint, without losing the regional identity that has shaped its leadership style.
The founders remain actively engaged in both long-horizon strategy and day-to-day decision-making, and the cultural attributes that have defined the firm - simplicity, a bias toward action, and continuous reinvention, have proved instrumental in its capacity to scale without losing coherence.
This case examines how CostaFoods Brasil partnered with Actio Software to translate strategic intent into operational discipline across its three brands — Avivar, Belavida, and Rara — by aligning management ritual, accountability, and technology around a single execution system.
CostaFoods Brazil
Website costafoodsbrasil.com.br
Industry Food production
Company size: +3,500 employees
Headquarters São Sebastião do Oeste, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Actio Solution: Strategy Management and Individual Performance
160+
Engaged collaborators in executing the strategy.
100%
live tracking in real-time of all indicators.
1
“Perfect marriage”between methodology and technology.
The strategy team expanded from 2 to 8 members.
Full breakdown of the strategy CEO until operation.
Assignment of roles and responsibilities clearer.
Challenges
By 2023, CostaFoods Brasil had reached the scale at which informal coordination begins to break down. The company's strategic ambition was clear at the top, but the mechanisms required to convert that ambition into measurable individual contribution had not kept pace with growth. Four interrelated problems had become difficult to ignore.
Data abundance, information scarcity
The organization was rich in data and poor in insight. Reporting was distributed across an expanding set of spreadsheets, with no shared standard for how charts were constructed, how indicators were defined, or how performance was interpreted. The result was a familiar pathology in scaling firms: leaders had access to more numbers than ever before, but found it harder, not easier, to read the business.
A missing strategic vocabulary
Meetings that informed without resolving
Diffuse accountability
The Approach: A Management System, Not a Tool
In June 2023, the company adopted the Actio platform as the operating layer for the new system. The implementation rested on four design choices:
- Standardization of indicators and meeting rituals, so that performance was discussed against a common language and a predictable cadence
- Explicit assignment of ownership for every action and indicator, from the board level down to operational coordination
- Institutionalization of PDCA cycles as the default problem-solving discipline, embedded in routine work rather than reserved for special initiatives
- Recurring, gamified leadership development to build the management capabilities the system required
ACTIO Impact
1
Concrete ownership of strategic work
The platform created a single source of truth for who owned which actions and which indicators. Directors, managers, and coordinators could no longer occupy ambiguous positions in the accountability chain. The shift from implicit to explicit ownership did more than improve reporting; it changed how leaders prepared for meetings, because the cost of arriving without an update was now visible to peers.
2
Meetings as decision forums
3
A continuous line of sight from strategy to operations
4
A culture that sustains the system
Three Lessons From the CostaFoods Brasil Experience
1
Leadership commitment is the binding constraint
Willian Fernandes is direct on this point: no management model and no platform survives a leadership group that is not fully invested in the change. Where senior leaders treat the system as someone else's project, even well-designed tools degrade into passive data repositories — generating reports that nobody acts on and creating administrative weight without a corresponding return.
He emphasizes the same factors McKinsey and HBR research consistently identify with successful transformations: continuous education, willingness to engage in productive internal disagreement as a source of innovation, and treating solution providers as strategic partners rather than vendors.
2
Capability-building is a system, not an event
The transformation was not a single intervention but a sustained capability program. Recurring training cycles, gamified workshops, and a network of internal "multipliers" carried strategic knowledge into every part of the organization.
Critically, training was not confined to senior leadership; it extended to data analysts, line managers, and operational teams, so that the same vocabulary — PDCA, indicator hierarchies, the platform's logic — was understood at every level. Education became a core pillar of execution, not an adjunct to it.
3
Technology Must Serve the Methodology
Perhaps the most important lesson is also the easiest to misread. Actio's effectiveness was a function of the management system it operated within.
CostaFoods Brasil did not deploy the platform and hope that practice would follow; the company built the practice and used the platform to enforce and scale it.
As a result, every action, indicator, and meeting carried a clear connection to a strategic objective. Without that integration, even the most sophisticated systems risk becoming heavy, fragmented, or detached from the decisions they are meant to support.
As a result, every action, indicator, and meeting carried a clear connection to a strategic objective. Without that integration, even the most sophisticated systems risk becoming heavy, fragmented, or detached from the decisions they are meant to support.
Summary
CostaFoods Brasil's transformation, supported by Falconi Consulting and the Actio platform, illustrates what it takes for a complex industrial organization to evolve from intuition-led management to a data-driven, methodologically aligned operating model.
The starting conditions — information overload, inconsistent standards, and ambiguous ownership — are common in firms that have outgrown their original management practices. The route forward combined three elements that reinforce one another: durable leadership commitment, structured methodology in the form of PDCA, and continuous capability-building. Technology entered the picture in service of that combination, not in place of it.
The result is an organization in which strategic intent now reaches the front line in a coherent and traceable way: real-time visibility, sharper decisions, and a culture of continuous improvement that does not depend on heroic individual effort to sustain it.
The broader lesson is one that the strategy-execution literature has been making for decades: transformation is not, finally, about tools. It is about people, purpose, and processes — and about the discipline to align them. Leadership support, sustained learning, productive conflict, and the integration of methodology with technology are the conditions under which lasting change becomes possible.