“We are a marketing, sales, logistics distribution, and recently, production company. We have several brands you probably know — Edenia, Food & Glory, Corso. We sell around 42,000 tons of food products on the market. Every day we do two things: we increase sales and reduce costs. And these things must happen regardless of whether we are in a crisis period or an economic boom,” said Albert Davidoglu, CEO of Macromex, during the Future Retail & FMCG Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

Key statements:

• At Macromex, we know very well how to understand processes and costs. We know how to adjust, merge, and migrate processes to reduce the cost base. And we do this every day. We do it precisely because you never know what can happen in such a volatile environment. How do we grow sales? It’s very much about agility and flexibility. We have an extremely versatile portfolio.
• If I look at our portfolio, we have low-priced products, mid-range products, and premium products. This gives us resilience when the market moves across different segments. We sell 17 categories, with over 1,000 products, and we built the portfolio to be versatile regardless of how the market evolves.
• What will happen in 2026? It’s normal to see some decline so that we have room to grow again. So, what’s happening is not abnormal. But what is happening now is something we somehow anticipated. Therefore, we adjusted our cost base. We introduced products that help us stay in positive territory.
• It is probably the most volatile year I have seen. We have very large ups and downs. We have very good months and very weak months, depending on consumer sentiment. If consumers perceive things negatively, they stop buying. If they perceive things positively, they buy. And this is something happening now in the Romanian economy. This negative state of mind among consumers — panic, fear, and uncertainty about where things are heading — makes them wait rather than spend.
• We own a B2B platform called Pocado. It has 10,000 customers, and 150,000 orders that we and the other 50 sellers on the platform receive. The figures are for Romania. It is an initiative we started in 2021 specifically to digitalize the ordering process and interaction with distributors’ portfolios.
• Having all this data in the system, we implemented this predictive ordering tool called Magico AI, and with just two clicks, any client on the platform can place an order.
• Penetration among our clients is still relatively low, and this comes together with what we see with AI adoption in general — adoption is slow.
• We use this predictive ordering system to tell the sales agent what their forecast revenue achievement is for each day or week, which clients may stop ordering, or which clients they are most likely to lose, so they know where to focus. At the same time, we can recommend what cross-sell actions they should take and which additional product categories they should resell to reach their targets.