The Client
Several of Conagra's iconic food brands include Hunt’s, Reddi-wip and Healthy Choice. These brands represent the company’s rich heritage of making great food with its new, sharpened focus on innovation.
The Situation
Conagra Brands is transforming the way it operates to fulfill what consumers and customers want, in a smart, simple way. To serve consumers and customers through a modernized approach, Conagra recognized the need to reinvigorate its digital platform, as forty percent of consumers learn about food and recipes through websites and mobile applications. However, without a Content Management System (CMS), each brand in Conagra’s portfolio spent more time maintaining and updating individual websites.
Conagra Brands needed a single digital platform that enabled simplicity and efficiency. So the company asked digital agency POSSIBLE to help implement a multisite strategy that would make site governance and brand consistency easy.
The Challenge
In 2016, ConAgra Foods completed the spin-off of its Lamb Weston business, becoming Conagra Brands. The company transformed into a singularly focused, consumer branded food company with a new, streamlined direction. In addition to rebranding, Conagra relocated its headquarters to Chicago from Omaha, which is still home to the company’s largest workforce of 1,200 employees. To support the company’s evolution, POSSIBLE was tasked with migrating more than 40 of Conagra’s custom-coded Java sites to one unified platform in less than a year. The goal was to simplify the way Conagra’s network of brand sites were created, updated and maintained, while enabling every brand to preserve its mark.
For Conagra Brands, efficiency was the name of the game. Extending existing investments in its preferred Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, Data Management Platform (DMP) and in-house recipe database was a top priority. POSSIBLE needed to find a technology partner that would allow Conagra to grow and innovate on its own terms while maintaining a consistent brand.
The Solution
After evaluating a variety of CMS platforms, POSSIBLE recommended Acquia as the vendor of choice to help Conagra Brands build and manage its network of sites. Our technical team, including members from Technical Account Management, helped Conagra consolidate its technical systems using Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Drupal 8 CMS.
POSSIBLE led the Acquia Cloud Site Factory build to standardize site development among all of Conagra’s brands. First, the team at POSSIBLE created a base template that contained all core functionality required by a brand site. When Conagra needed to spin up a new site for Swiss Miss or Orville Redenbacher's, for example, POSSIBLE simply duplicated the site template stored in Acquia Cloud Site Factory. Because every site shares a single code base, platform maintenance and governance is effortless. With Acquia Cloud Site Factory, Conagra can support its broad portfolio of brands, in addition to corporate, careers, food service, nutrition and recipe sites.
At Acquia, we want our customers to build on their own terms. This means providing a flexible platform that allows organizations to extend investments across all of their technical systems. We helped Conagra Brands integrate its preferred back-end systems, such as a CRM and DMP, with Drupal 8. This includes the ability to expose content from Conagra’s in-house recipe database to every Drupal website. Our commitment to being API-first helped Conagra build a platform that is best-of-breed. Instead of rip and replace, Conagra was able to build a technology stack with the technologies that best suited its business needs.
Once site governance and management was streamlined, Conagra Brands was empowered to try something new. In addition to revamping each brand site, Conagra also launched its Ready Set Eat site on Acquia Cloud Site Factory. The mission of Ready Set Eat is to inspire consumers to “go beyond [their] usual ‘go-to’ recipes and cook like never before.” The site provides visitors with recipes and food content that is relevant to a variety of modern consumer preferences and needs.
“In order to support the relaunch of Conagra Brands, we recognized the need for a tool like Site Factory to rapidly build a reliable network of sites,” said Todd Barker, director of technology solutions at POSSIBLE. “Once we built a base architecture and framework, the ability to clone a site and re-theme it for each brand was a critical component of our selection and recommendation of Acquia.”
Acquia Cloud Site Factory relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for best-in-class cloud computing power that helps us deliver open source digital experience innovation to Conagra with enterprise scale, security, and reliability all over the world using AWS services like EC2 and Aurora.
The Results
We helped Conagra Brands assemble a digital platform that makes multisite governance and delivery fast, and removes the complexity from maintaining a network of brand sites. The new site also earned Conagra and POSSIBLE the 2017 Acquia Engage Award for Best Consumer Brand Experience.
After launching Ready Set Eat, Conagra has witnessed an increase in both user engagement and site conversions.
- Bounce rate: Decreased by 15 percent
- Site visitor time consuming content: Increased by 27 percent
- Recipe conversion rate: Increased by 114 percent
- Integration with Conagra’s preferred DMP has reduced market spending
- 2017 Engage Award Winner for Best Consumer Brand Experience
Acquia Cloud Site Factory also marks an important milestone in POSSIBLE’s tenured partnership with Conagra. In addition to its Drupal expertise, POSSIBLE’s mastery of Site Factory means its technical team can now rely on a new tool to help clients overcome the similar challenges