Digital experience company Acquia today announced that it is powering the direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital experience for King Arthur Flour, the country’s oldest flour company. With stay-at-home orders sweeping the country, and novice bakers trying their hand at various recipes, more people than ever are turning to the King Arthur Flour website for recipes, tutorials and baking supplies. Traffic to the site has reached all-time highs in 2020 and continues to grow, with instructional content such as sourdough baking guides and video series continuing to attract burgeoning bakers. As a result of this demand for content, website sessions are up 260% and ecommerce sales have increased 200% year-over-year in the first few months of 2020 vs. 2019.
With its digital agency partner Third and Grove, Acquia helped King Arthur Flour build and deliver a new content-driven experience that supports the company’s mission to be the ultimate resource and inspiration in the kitchen. The previous version of the website featured 2,000 baker-tested recipes, but wasn’t built to host dynamic, personalized content that changed with the consumer’s needs. Together with Third and Grove, Acquia tightly integrated content and commerce, so the marketing team could quickly set up new recipe pages, highlight key information, and direct consumers to the right products to buy.
The revamped King Arthur Flour digital experience is also resilient and can respond to surges in demand without failure. For example, using Acquia Drupal Cloud, King Arthur Flour has quickly scaled its cloud infrastructure to meet unpredictable traffic surges from stay-at-home baking enthusiasts. While such traffic surges typically happen around the holidays, pandemic baking has far exceeded holiday demand, and on a much more sustained basis. King Arthur Flour’s sourdough starter page had 2.5 million pageviews over the past ten weeks alone. To contrast, in 2019, total pageviews sitewide the day before Thanksgiving (a major traffic day) were 955,000.
“As the situation evolves daily with stay-at-home orders, we couldn’t be happier to have Acquia and Drupal in place to help us quickly and reliably deliver the recipes and videos that matter to our customers,” said Mike Hoefer, director of web development at King Arthur Flour. “Our new digital experience reflects the modern King Arthur Flour brand, and has helped us weather the unexpected pandemic baking trend.”
In addition, using its new digital platform, the King Arthur Flour brand has been able to experiment with creative, engaging content such as its Homebound Baking Guide shows hosted by King Arthur’s leading bakers as well as renowned celebrity bakers. This page – which includes video series such as The Isolation Baking Show, Baking With Kids, and Martin Bakes at Home – was built solely by digital marketing without technical assistance. So far, it has been seen close to 10 million times across King Arthur Flour digital and web channels.
“We’re proud that one of the most storied American food companies trusts Acquia to power its digital brand transformation,” said Lynne Capozzi, CMO of Acquia. “Acquia’s technology was built to help brands handle unexpected events, and pandemic baking is no exception. By tying engaging content to commerce, King Arthur Flour’s digital business has been able to thrive in unprecedented conditions.”
About Acquia
Acquia is the open digital experience company. We provide the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. At Acquia, we believe in the power of community – giving our customers the freedom to build tomorrow on their terms. To learn more, visit www.acquia.com.
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