Transforming Maple Leaf Foods’ Brands for the Modern Age
Maple Leaf Foods has been providing Canadian families with high-quality, great-tasting protein products for over 100 years under leading brands such as Maple Leaf, Schneiders, and Greenfield Natural Meats. With 10+ brands, Maple Leaf Foods needed a harmonious ecosystem to manage all websites seamlessly.
Brands We Serve
Overview
With brands scattered across different hosts, platforms, and vendors, Maple Leaf Farms needed a solution that would allow them to bring all their properties together under one roof while still maintaining each brand’s unique identity.
There was a considerable technical debt associated with updating or creating new sites because of the dispersed nature of their system that Maple Leaf Foods wanted to resolve. Trew Knowledge proposed a consolidated ecosystem on a WordPress Multisite network that would provide Maple Leaf Foods with a harmonious, scalable, and secure architecture for all brands while resolving their technical debt.
what we delivered
Simple, scalable solutions for a large corporate enterprise
A New Maple Leaf Foods Website
The brand new Maple Leaf Foods corporate website was launched in April 2022. It combines clean design and unparalleled customized solutions to support the company’s editorial needs and provide the user with accessible communication and easy-to-navigate pages.
Leveraging the Block Editor
We transitioned Maple Leaf Foods from their previous website builder to the WordPress block editor. The block editor allows us to develop different components once but use those same components across multiple sites with small adjustments that will enable the teams to maintain their brand identities. These components—or “blocks”—can build robust layouts to create websites that create a brand impact while the core functionality remains the same.
Streamlining the Process of Building and Updating New Sites
The multisite architecture supports future website additions and makes the content creation even more intuitive and easy to share across sites. It also gives the Maple Leaf Foods team flexibility when creating customized, creative designs that fit with the larger brand but also stand out as a specific sub-brand.
Prioritizing the User Experience with SiteImprove
Working towards the well-being and nutrition of Canadian families is a core value that drives Maple Leaf Foods. To ensure their customers have a positive experience while on their website, we integrated the new sites with SiteImprove, a SaaS solution that helps improve accessibility, SEO, and performance issues. By leveraging this tool, each Maple Leaf Foods site can continue to improve, mitigate broken links, and deliver an exceptional user experience.
Automatically Generating Nutritional Facts
We integrated the multisite ecosystem with Salsify, a plugin that pulls nutritional facts from the Maple Leaf Foods database and enters it directly onto the websites. This integration means that the team only needs to keep the nutritional facts up to date on the database, and they will automatically be up to date on the website. Often, brands with retail packaging have a difficult time keeping nutritional facts up to date. Our Salsify integration is a seamless process that ensures that nutritional information is always accurate and available to consumers.
Challenges
Creating a harmonious, complementary ecosystem for a large family of brands
Trew Knowledge worked with diverse partners across 7+ brands to create a repeatable, scalable, and flexible ecosystem to allow for accurate brand representation. With 7+ sets of brand guidelines, stakeholders, and current systems, we worked to ensure that all stakeholders were on board with the vision and created a WordPress ecosystem that allowed all brands to live in one place. Now, Maple Leaf Foods is at an advantage when they want to create a new website, as they have all the necessary building blocks to quickly and easily build new sites while providing their users with a cohesive experience across their brands.
01.
Maple Leaf
We created a website aligned with the brand’s values and goals that allowed them to stay in contact with their customers. The site architecture is easy to update and highly efficient, so the Maple Leaf Foods team will never miss an opportunity to launch new products and promotions on time.
02.
Schneiders
One of Maple Leaf Foods’ flagship brands, Schneiders, has been offering delicious-tasting, premium meat products since 1890. Using the Guttenberg editor, we created a website for Schneiders that fits cohesively with the Maple Leaf Foods family while also reflecting its history and unique brand guidelines.
03.
Greenfield Natural Meat Co.
A meat brand with a purpose, Greenfield Natural Meat Co. was founded in 2015 with the goal of making a better world by making meat right. Greenfield Natural Meat Co. uses free-range sows, meat that is never treated with antibiotics, and has worked to reduce its carbon emissions.
04.
Lightlife
Lightlife, established in 1979, is renowned for its commitment to simple, clean ingredients and high-quality plant-based products. Along with the updated website, we created a landing page to support their “This is Tempehfy” campaign. We provided the Lightlife team with a scalable and maintainable system for future updates while empowering their admins by giving them greater control over their CMS.
05.
Grab’n Snack
Perfectly portioned snacks that pack a protein punch—that’s what you get with the Grab’n Snack brand. Their ready-to-go snacks have 9+ grams of meat protein, leaving you full and ready to take on your day.
06.
Mitchell’s
Established in the early 1940s, Mitchell’s aims to bring crowd-pleasing meals you can feel good about eating to tables across Canada. They believe great food is meant to be shared to build connections and create memories with those we love.
The Results
Maple Leaf Foods is now using a cohesive multisite ecosystem that allows them to create new custom sites quickly and efficiently using the block editor. Thanks to the easy-to-use, component-based system, their technical debt has been significantly reduced, and the time to market for new sites and landing pages has decreased.
20
new websites developed.
80%
faster go-to-market for branded websites
6
sub-brands supported.
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