Pilmico Foods Corporation, a powerhouse in the Filipino food and agribusiness industry, has embarked on a groundbreaking digital transformation, becoming the first company in the Philippines to deploy AWS Outposts. The announcement was made at the AWS Cloud Day Philippines 2025 event held at Shangri-La The Fort in Manila.
This strategic move is not just a technological upgrade; it’s a bold solution to a long-standing challenge: ensuring seamless, high-performance operations in the country’s most remote locations, regardless of connectivity.
The genesis of a digital transformation
Gary Eugenio, AVP for IT Infrastructure at Aboitiz Foods
According to Gary Eugenio, AVP for IT Infrastructure at Aboitiz Foods, Pilmico’s AWS journey began “four or five years ago” with an initial inquiry into AWS Outposts.
At the time, the only option was a “full rack subscription,” which required the company to meet the demands of maintaining an entire server rack — a solution that was, as Eugenio puts it, “a bit expensive.”
Everything changed in late 2023 when AWS introduced a smaller version of Outposts, the OneRU server option. This new flexibility was a “game changer,” providing a viable and cost-effective path forward for the company.
Unlocking efficiency in remote, disconnected locations
A key division of Aboitiz Foods, Pilmico is an integrated agribusiness and food company and a subsidiary of Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc. (AEV). It oversees a massive network of flour, feeds, farms, and trading operations across the archipelago. With its two key divisions — Pilmico Foods Corporation and Pilmico Animal Nutrition Corporation — the company delivers high-quality wheat flour, animal nutrition solutions, and technical support. From flour milling and animal nutrition to farming and meat processing, its integrated operations add value across the entire food value chain.
Pilmico’s IT landscape is unique, encompassing both office and manufacturing environments. The challenge was most pronounced in the manufacturing plants, which rely on legacy on-premise systems like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) to communicate with equipment on the production line.
For years, managing these critical applications in remote sites was a logistical puzzle, as they demanded “sub-millisecond” response times for safety and real-time quality control. These systems often suffered from limited internet bandwidth, causing delays that could impact production and efficiency.
The solution came in the form of AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that brings AWS infrastructure and services directly to an on-premises location. By placing this technology on-site, Pilmico can now process these latency-sensitive workloads locally at each manufacturing facility. This ensures consistent sub-millisecond performance, guaranteeing that vital plant equipment can operate without a hitch, even when the internet is slow or unavailable.
This innovation has far-reaching benefits. It eliminates the complexity of managing disparate, location-specific IT systems. Pilmico can now standardize its entire IT infrastructure, using the same AWS tools and APIs they would use in the cloud. This consistency simplifies operations, reduces management overhead, and, most importantly, provides a robust foundation for the company’s ambitious international expansion across Asia.
The success of this strategy was proven with a pilot program at their Capas, Tarlac facility in September 2023, and Pilmico is now rolling out AWS Outposts across its remaining Philippine sites.
Solving complex IT needs for agribusiness
“Our manufacturing operations depend on critical applications that require high performance and low latency, particularly in remote locations,” said Gary Eugenio, AVP for IT Infrastructure at Aboitiz Foods. “AWS Outposts provides us with a consistent, cloud-native platform that maintains the local processing capabilities we need while significantly simplifying our IT operations.”
Kevin Kwan, ASEAN Specialist Leader at AWS, highlighted the significance of the partnership, saying, “Agribusinesses are increasingly looking to modernize their operations with cloud-native technologies while maintaining critical on-premises capabilities.”
He added, “By choosing AWS Outposts, Pilmico gains the ability to run low-latency workloads on-premises with the same AWS tools, APIs, and functionality they would use in the cloud, enabling them to standardize operations and accelerate innovation across their entire organization.”
Empowering Pilmico with a modern, localized cloud
Kevin Kwan (left) of AWS, together with Gary Eugenio of Pilmico while answering media queries
During the Q&A session that followed, Gary Eugenio and Kevin Kwan of AWS offered additional insights into this landmark partnership. Eugenio described AWS Outposts as a foundational technology that is “localized by nature,” allowing for local data processing and integration with their existing cloud environment.
Kwan, for his part, noted that Outposts has three main unique attributes. First, it brings the cloud directly to the customer’s facility through a set of server racks, a key characteristic. Second, it ensures data is processed and stored locally, which is vital for customers with “regulatory reasons” or those who need “ultra-low latency.” Third, it gives businesses the ability to run applications on-site.
When asked about return on investment (ROI), Eugenio explained that Pilmico uses different metrics. He highlighted that a manufacturing plant’s key performance indicator is downtime, so they prioritize keeping the plants “running.” He also noted that with the much smaller OneRU server option compared to the older, larger versions, the company sees savings in “overhead and the cost.”
Regarding scaling the solution, Eugenio stated that the company plans to reference a “rule of thumb” ratio for deployment: “for every one RU of AWS server, you could be able to incorporate or move critical application to the one-to-four processing line.” The long-term plan is to replicate the established architecture and deploy it across their other facilities in the Philippines and, eventually, in their international operations in countries like Vietnam and Thailand.
Kwan then explained that AWS aims to give customers as many options as possible to adopt the cloud. He also offered a powerful anecdote about Pilmico’s past operations: if a plant was disconnected, a person would have to manually log data with a “pad” and “pen” and then bring it to the office. This shows the “drastic change” that AWS Outposts has brought to traditional industries, creating a “very compelling ROI.”
This partnership between Pilmico and AWS is a powerful case study for how Filipino companies can overcome geographical challenges to embrace modern technology. It shows that with the right tools, it’s possible to maintain world-class performance and efficiency, no matter how remote the location. For Pilmico, this is more than just a technological upgrade; it’s a key step in their mission to sustainably feed Asia’s growth, from mill to meal.
