Food for thought: Quorn chooses Contentful to satisfy the global meat-free market

The company, now owned by multinational Monde Nissin Corporation, has been winning over tastebuds ever since with meat-free burgers, nuggets, sausages, deli slices, roasts and fishless fillets. Across markets, Quorn offers over 100 products with options for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

To keep up with the appetite for Quorn’s range of products in a growing global marketplace, the company’s websites needed a refresh. With the objective of becoming the first $1 billion global brand in the meat-free category, it knew that brand communication would play a key role. That meant launching new websites in both existing markets and new markets as quickly as possible.

Quorn turned to Anything and chose Contentful to manage its content. It’s proved a fruitful partnership: Quorn launched 21 new websites in less than three months, and teams can now upload recipes faster than it takes to cook some of them.

We talked with Jonny Wilcox, account director at Anything, about how Contentful drastically cut website production times, streamlined workflows and supersized localization.

What are the top three business problems that Contentful solved?

JW:

1. Long lead times when launching websites in new markets. On average it took six to 12 months for teams to launch a new website from brief to live. For example, the previous CMS would not allow writers to populate content until page structures were finalized. This led to elongated development timelines.

2. Poor user experience. The previous CMS was overcomplicated. It included a lot of additional features that the team didn’t use and slowed down writers and editors when editing or adding new content to websites. Now adding a new recipe only takes about 20 minutes for multiple locales, including Quorn’s key markets.

3. The existing international websites were managed in situ. Multiple codebases needed to be supported, which lead to inconsistencies in formatting and content between sites. And the more codebases, the more development work required. For example, when the team wanted to include a video feature in our recipes, developers needed to add that field into each codebase. This demanded significant development costs and time. Something that used to take a full day now only takes a few hours with Contentful.

How did you achieve faster time to market?

JW: Quorn wanted to complete the international website roll-out as quickly as possible in 2017 to ensure that it had an updated presence in each market. With Contentful, teams were able to work on multiple websites at once. Their teams could populate content well in advance of working on design and development. The result was through partnering with Anything, Quorn launched 21 new websites in less than three months, including websites for the newer Southeast Asia markets.

What role did Contentful have in creating more consistency across these markets?

JW: By developing a single codebase and using Contentful as the CMS, we’re able to rapidly roll-out new content across markets. New fields can easily be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the market.

What about the overall user experience, did that improve?

JW: By limiting the fields to those that are used, writers and editors worked more quickly when uploading, editing and publishing content.

Were there any increases in engagement or conversion rates thanks to the switch to Contentful?

JW: As a result of a consistent, mobile-first approach to key markets, the team saw the following average year-on-year comparison before and after launch:

• 36% increase in organic traffic across key markets

• 59% increase in organic sessions across key markets

• 38% decrease in page load times across key markets