Thursday 20 October 2011

An essential ingredient... ID of course!



About 3 months ago we were contacted by Essential Cuisine, a high-quality manufacturer of stocks, jus and glace to the food industry.

Their products are used all over the UK in Michelin Star rated restaurants and the best gastro pubs.

They have a great b2b business and felt there was a market to sell to consumers so they could enjoy their amazing stock at home, when entertaining or just cooking that special dish. Foodies around the country were in for a treat!

They had to develop packaging, a business model and an eCommerce website in less than 3 months, so the team they worked with had to be capable and efficient. The Hive were contracted to look at branding and packaging, and they did a fantastic job, see below:



Essential Cuisine took care of the business model and pricing. And the product of course!

Then Preston's digital agency Interactive Dimension took on the website. It needed to be an elegant eCommerce solution which was more than 'just' a shop. Essential Cuisine wanted to become a hub of information so we developed a recipes section and a tips area where they could post fantastic recipes for their customers and give that invaluable professional chef insight on how to deliver top-class food at home.

The content needed to be as prominent as the 'shop' itself to give the right feel to the site. It was important that the site attracted users who were there for information as well as to buy stocks.

We leveraged the Worldpay payment gateway (which has it's own challenges!) and needed to integrate with the Royal Mail labeling system Essential Cuisine used already.

It's a small site in terms of products featured, but the capability is there to grow via the content management system behind it all, and as Essential Cuisine bring new products to the consumer from their fantastic food industry range the site can easily accommodate them and allow them to feature in prime spots on the site.

As well as the eCommerce site, we also developed an email newsletter for them which will be delivered using our Campaign Monitor based system, and we created their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Which is all starting to take shape. We advised on the social media strategy and empowered Essential Cuisine to take ownership of the social media rather than pay someone else to do it, which after all, is what social media is about! They're already running competitions on Facebook too!

Now it's about driving traffic to the site, Essential Cuisine already have a large user base on their food industry site, and a marketing strategy in place for the retail offering... we're supporting them with digital marketing services and are confident that the foodie community will quickly get on-board, after all, who wouldn't want to use the best stocks that up to now only the best restaurants could get hold of?

Most interestingly of all to the customers, is that Essential Cuisine's stocks work out significantly cheaper than the current gathering of 'quality' stocks you can buy in the supermarket. The equivalent amount of Truefoods chicken stock compared to £3.95 of Essential Cuisine chicken stock would cost you around £18.00, and wouldn't be as tasty or versatile either!

We think they're onto a winner, and we're glad to help make it happen.

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