NEW YORK — Managing the supply chain over the past several years has been a challenge for most food manufacturers, and Kraft Heinz Co. has not been immune to the struggles. What the Chicago-based maker of ketchup and macaroni and cheese has done, though, is focus on three key qualities that give it the best shot at success: resilience, predictability and adaptability.

To survive in the current environment companies must be resilient, Miguel Patricio, chairman and chief executive officer of Kraft Heinz, said during a June 2 presentation at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference.

“For resilience, we need to do a lot in the sense of inspiring this crowd,” he said.

A second key quality is predictability, Mr. Patricio said.

“It’s hard to predict today this world but predictability is critical,” he said. “I’ll give you an example. A current example, it’s happening right now. So we predicted that we would face a shortage of bean gum. Bean gum is the product that gives consistency to ice cream and to cream cheese — Philadelphia Cream Cheese. And basically, because the crop that comes basically from Morocco was very bad, and we had good intelligence to understand that this would be a problem. And so we acquired a big inventory of bean gum, believing that we would have a shortage. That’s predictability. The result of that is we’re gaining a lot of share in cream cheese because we predicted well.”

The third and final key quality to a successful supply chain is adaptability, Mr. Patricio said.