The Challenge
B&G Foods has more than 50 brands of household-name packaged and canned foods, such as Green Giant, Weber, Cream of Wheat and Crisco. Each of these brands has a separate web presence, but since many were added to the portfolio via acquisition, they were built on many different platforms and web technologies. B&G Foods needed all of their web properties combined into a single, industry-standard web platform for easier management and consistency.
Our Approach
Working closely with B&G Foods, WordPress was chosen to be the platform for all existing and future B&G Foods websites. The Yalo Team quickly jumped into action inventorying all existing web properties, their individual characteristics (page counts, technologies, capabilities, eccentricities, etc.) and worked closely with the client to prioritize the site migrations based on which were more active with updates on a regular basis.
With B&G Foods’ website portfolio on so many non-standard technologies, it was difficult for our brand teams to make updates in a timely manner. With Digital Yalo’s help, we were able to build a web ecosystem that is very easy to use and will assist in the speed to market of our brand teams’ product updates.
Amy Trueblood, Digital Marketing & eCommerce Manager
A Demanding Timeline
This project came with a fixed deadline of the end of 2020 to migrate all 50 sites so as not to incur additional fees – a mere 5 months. Yalo knew we would need to have a highly strategic approach in order to move as quickly as the deadline demanded.
Of the 50 sites, only a handful were already on WordPress so all of the others would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Yalo Web developers created a standard process – all working on the first site together, then taking individual sites and building out the shell of those sites before importing product and recipe data from the previous sites’ databases.
Streamlining Development
Yalo identified common components across all of the B&G properties in order to develop a modular framework that would work well among all the sites. This approach streamlined development by creating reusable code with enough flexibility built in to accommodate different brands, fonts and colors.
Yalo proceeded to migrate and launch new sites all through the months of October, November and December – working through the holidays – to meet the deadline of migrating all sites by the end of 2020. In all, a total of more than 7500 individual web pages were migrated from prior platforms to the new environment.
New Design and Development
In addition to transferring existing sites and all of their associated content, Yalo was tasked with entirely new design and development across several B&G properties including Skinny Girl and Wrights Liquid Smoke. While these new designs utilized the existing framework we had put in place to take advantage of speed to launch, they also included some new design details including transitions, animations and video.
The Results
Yalo has been retained to support and maintain all of the migrated B&G sites for a number of years, as well as to support bringing all new acquisition sites into the new environment or develop new sites altogether, such as BakingAtHome.com. Our front and back-end Web development expertise as well as other creative services and project management skills enabled B&G Foods to present their cornucopia of food brands at the same digital table.
