Meet Food Folk
Food Folk Group is the independent master franchisee operating the McDonald's brand across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. Formed in 2017, the organization manages business operations for over 500 restaurants, serving 160 million customers annually.
Within this vast restaurant ecosystem, the marketing department serves as a vital engine for regional growth. Spread across regional offices and time zones, and coordinating with support teams, franchisees, and agency partners, it places monday.com’s AI capabilities and automation at the center of its digital workspace to keep its regional execution highly agile. This enables the marketing team to launch large-scale campaigns across the region, advancing McDonald’s mission to make delicious, feel-good moments easy for everyone.
The challenge
Before centralizing operations, Food Folk managed marketing assets and campaign schedules across a fragmented network of traditional tools. Project notes often remained locked inside local meeting rooms, while updates were scattered across personal email threads, phone calls, and static presentations. With marketing teams distributed across four countries, this disjointed communication created information silos and made it hard for employees to understand which document was the latest version. The department also struggled with disconnected campaign tracking boards that duplicated data, while inconsistent file-naming conventions prevented internal software systems from connecting properly, slowing down campaign delivery.
“When information sits in silos, the process loses transparency,” says Mikko Poutanen, Digital Products and Services Lead at Food Folk, McDonald’s in the Nordics. “Without shared visibility across our regional offices, it becomes difficult to spot operational blocks before they delay a campaign.”
The solution
Why monday.com?
To build a scalable future state rather than simply patching old workflows, Food Folk needed a project management platform that could adapt and grow with the business. After a thorough evaluation, Food Folk chose monday.com for its ability to integrate with its wider marketing technology software and support operations across its four Nordic markets. The company initially deployed the platform internally to coordinate daily campaigns and collaborate with external advertising agencies. As its user base grew, Food Folk partnered with Aety, a certified monday.com Platinum Partner based in Denmark, to help refine the platform and optimize its setup.
“We initially deployed the platform ourselves to run daily campaigns, but as more teams joined, we wanted to maximize its capabilities,” says Poutanen. “monday.com serves as our operational control tower, and partnering with Aety has helped us build the lean, automated structure we need to succeed.”
Connecting data with a master architecture
As more employees began using monday.com across the Nordics, individual teams initially created dozens of separate campaign workflow boards. While this helped people get started, it scattered project details and made it hard to track marketing deadlines and assets. To solve this, Food Folk collaborated with Aety to redesign the platform structure, introducing a unified master product template board to serve as the definitive source of truth. Instead of teams navigating separate regional setups, everyone views the same synchronized information, ensuring complete alignment across all four countries before launching a campaign.
“We saw that having multiple boards was forcing teams to manually update data in several places,” says Ida Tandrup Rübner, Monday Customer Success Manager at Aety. “With the master template, updating information in one central location automatically updates every regional dashboard simultaneously, so our teams are sure of what they’re seeing.”
Eliminating creative friction through automation
Food Folk relies on this clean data structure to simplify how advertising materials are produced. Instead of building a digital advertisement from scratch each time, the company breaks the creative assets down into individual components — such as background color, product image and price tag — inside monday.com boards. When a user updates a detail like a promotional price on the board, monday.com automatically sends this new information through an API connection straight to the company's content management platform, which instantly generates the finished advertisement, removing the need to write manual briefs.
Empowering teams with AI and custom interfaces
Food Folk also uses monday.com's built-in AI tools to further streamline daily tasks. Non-technical marketing staff use the platform's AI assistant, Sidekick, to quickly input updates directly into specific project boards without manual clicking. Employees also use vibe coding to build custom dashboards for non-technical team members. These simplified screens display exact campaign timelines, local contact directories, and key performance indicators without forcing users to navigate large, data-heavy project tracking boards. Because vibe coding allows users with no technical background to design these interfaces themselves, teams can quickly build the exact tools they need without waiting for a developer, making day-to-day collaboration much faster.
The impact
Centralizing operations on monday.com has transformed how Food Folk coordinates its regional marketing, while supporting steady team growth. Between 2023 and 2026, platform adoption expanded by 50 seats, growing from 150 to 200 users as more cross-functional departments and external media agencies joined the workspace.
Importantly, with monday.com, the time required to take a digital channel advertisement from an initial brief to live production has been reduced from up to several weeks to just minutes. By automating repetitive administrative tasks and asset workflows, Food Folk has reduced agency billing hours and eliminated manual data entry. This efficiency allows the marketing team to shift focus away from routine tasks toward working with highly creative, innovative brand strategies.
“By using monday.com to centralize our project data and trigger our content pipelines, we have eliminated the repetitive tasks that used to slow us down,” says Poutanen. “Instead of manually managing files and agency briefs, our teams can put their energy into high-impact marketing campaigns that connect with our customers. With monday.com, we have successfully built our future way of operating. Now we just need to scale it.”
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