Ford Maverick team ate tons of Oreos while working in secret room

Ford has earned a reputation for building and selling bazillions of pickup trucks, which today are the financial backbone of the 118-year-old automaker.

Already its all-new little bitty hybrid pickup is creating a whole new buzz. 

In the five weeks since Maverick was revealed, consumers have placed 74,100 reservations for the 2022 Ford Maverick pickup, Hannah Ooms told the Free Press on Friday morning.

While that’s a really big deal, this story is about what helped Ford find success with this project. And that’s where Oreo cookies come into play.

The Ford team worked secretly in the bowels of the Ford Product Development Center complex off Village Road in Dearborn for about three years in a hidden room were spare parts had been stored. It was a team of about 60 people led by chief engineer Chris Mazur that developed the engineering, design, product development, purchasing, supply chain and finance strategy for the Maverick.

While all official duties were assigned, Katie Pecoraro realized something was missing.

In the case of the Ford Maverick team, food played a huge role.

“We cut 20 months out of the usual time frame for a product lifecycle,” said Pecoraro, Maverick program management supervisor. The team was working as quickly as possible to surprise consumers and Wall Street and create a popular compact truck in the U.S. News of the unexpected product stunned everybody.  

“Most of our design and studio appearance work is done in the early stages. Our last year is developing prototypes and doing hands-on work. We were in this space, one big cross-functional team sitting in a huge room which is something we’ve never done before — just working together as a bunch of different disciplines. This being a go-fast product, we used different ways of working to be more efficient and effective. High level management members came to us to work through milestones, rather than going through months of a different cadence.”