Nestlé Germany
Drupal, Acquia Cloud Platform, Acquia Site Factory
reduction in page load times
average page load times
The Client
As the world’s largest food and beverage company, Nestlé is driven by a simple aim: unlocking the power of food to enhance the quality of life for everyone, today and for generations to come. The Nestlé company history began in 1866, with the foundation of the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company. Henri Nestlé developed a breakthrough baby food in 1867 and in 1905 his company merged with Anglo-Swiss to form what we know as the Nestlé Group.
Today the company employs around 273,000 people — including 8,450 employees across 12 locations in Germany — and has operations in 188 countries.
The Situation
Nestlé Germany’s digital technologies and transformation services (DTS) team was responsible for providing support for all of Nestlé’s digital brands in the German market.
The Challenge
Like many multi-brand corporations, Nestlé Germany’s websites were siloed. This disjointed approach meant that costs for security testing and other necessary maintenance services were unnecessarily expensive. And because brand representatives couldn’t make simple site content updates without employing the assistance of external development agencies, costs continued to rise.
Nestlé Germany’s DTS team knew it needed to work quickly to reduce costs. They wanted a platform that would empower its brands to easily create, change, or update content whenever needed, ultimately improving site performance for users while providing high reliability, availability, and performance.
The DTS team set several key objectives for the new platform:
- Reduce costs by consolidating and modernizing the web infrastructure
- Minimize the risk of security and compliance incidents
- Create operational efficiencies through continuous refinements to technology and infrastructure
- Deliver accurate and consistent brand content with speed
- Monitor website effectiveness to identify opportunities for improvement
The Solution
As Drupal and Acquia were approved solutions within Nestlé, Nestlé Germany’s DTS team decided to migrate their current brand sites to the platform.
Working together with Acquia’s technical account management team, Nestlé Germany deployed Drupal using Acquia’s Build and Launch Tool (BLT), then implemented Acquia Site Factory, Acquia Search, Acquia Edge CDN, and Acquia Edge Security. The company has also internally built and deployed numerous custom first-party integrations with other technologies.
With Site Factory in place, Nestlé Germany has one consolidated code base — meaning it only needs one security process to protect all sites effectively. Site Factory also makes maintenance and updates easier; Nestlé Germany can have multiple environments simultaneously, allowing teams to work on different feature sets in parallel, then test and decide which will be released. This multi-environment setup also means the teams don’t have to wait to finish a release before starting the next. And the platform’s logging and debugging help Nestlé Germany’s DTS team analyze and address issues before they become larger problems.
The Results
The initial project — which rebuilt more than 10 websites — took just over a year. Migrating to Acquia allowed Nestlé Germany to reduce costs by streamlining its security processes through Site Factory. Additionally, because Acquia’s flexible solution allowed Nestlé Germany brands to easily update content and keep audiences interested, site traffic and time on page have both improved.
The new platform provides much better performance results across the board. For example, site speed improved, with page load times now averaging 3.76 seconds, representing a 48% reduction.
