How one culture-focused Mexican beverage company built their digital home with Happeo

Nothing says “home” like sharing food and drink with one another, and that’s what drives Novamex, a beverage company with a mission to bring the Hispanic/Mexican culture across the globe to as many homes as possible. They do this through distributing their brands of drinks, including Jarritos, Sidral Mundet, Steaz, Sangría Señorial, C2O and Waiakea across the globe. And in the same way they are delivering culture in the homes of their customers, they sought to bring Novamex into the homes of all their employees to build and nurture culture.

The Problem

With culture at the center of its values, Novamex has always been committed to enveloping and instilling that culture for each and every employee. From in-person onboarding and extensive cross-collaborative training to truly building relationships with all co-workers, Novamex was committed to making sure their employees felt and lived the culture of the brand and the company. But cultivating this culture became difficult when COVID 19 struck. To maintain their dynamic culture despite the pandemic isolation, Donna Sanchez (Chief Human Resources Officer) looked for a way to bring the Novamex culture into every home of their employees—just like the company does with their customers.

Why Happeo

Novamex partnered with Happeo to begin building their digital home, a place that would keep their distributed employees together across 28 states and 6 countries. It was Happeo’s user-friendliness and deep integration with Google that made Mario, the Novamex Cultural Ambassador, “fall in love” with the platform. 

During this time, when it was difficult to connect with colleagues, Happeo’s ability to post pictures and videos made Novamex employees feel a little less isolated and helped to maintain the culture that is at the heart of the business. This includes some of the harder-to-reach employees who work in warehouses or in the field. The Happeo mobile app ensured that no one felt disconnected from the Novamex digital home.

Finally, Happeo’s analytics allow internal comms and culture leaders to see how effective their comms and connection strategies are. They can see who is engaging how and with what content. This insight helps the team adjust the strategy for the plan to keep engagement strong and morale high. They run incentive programs with Happeo to get Novamex employees excited and bring more of the Novamex culture into their lives.

What’s Next for Novamex and Happeo?

At Happeo, we not only guide our customers through launch and implementation phases, but we help support them over time to grow and mature their site, and expand the scope of the platform with Happeo’s wide breadth of applications. And what started as a cultural need for Novamex will evolve into more than that over time, positioning Happeo as a critical piece in the overall business strategy. 

When new employees begin at Novamex, they meet with every single team and department to learn the business deeply so that each person can be empowered by that knowledge and do their best work. While this practice continues in in-person onboarding and training programs, the Novamex team has plans to dive deeper into their Happeo uses by digitizing the knowledge from across the organization and keeping it in one easily searchable location so that it can benefit everyone at any time.

This equal commitment to a strong, flavorful culture and the ability to learn and grow together has made Novamex a hallmark organization to work for, with very little turnover and happy, loyal employees. Happeo has been a core platform in protecting the flame of culture for Novamex during a difficult time, fanning that flame over time, and helping to transform the organization from the inside out.