Arla Foods

Transforming Inspiration into Sales

One of the largest dairy producers in the world has transformed their business and organization with the addition of a seemingly simple "Add to basket" button.

Facts

Industry

  • Manufacturing & Distribution

Service

  • Experience Elevation
  • Marketing Creativity & Performance
  • Commerce Acceleration

Technology

  • Optimizely

Get to Know Arla Foods

About

As the world’s fifth largest dairy company and the single largest supplier of organic dairy products globally, Arla is truly creating the future of dairy for all of us, leading the agenda for a healthy, natural and responsible dairy industry.

Tracing back to the 1880s when dairy farmers in Denmark and Sweden joined forces in cooperatives, Arla has transformed and evolved into a massive, global company with well-known brands such as Lurpak and Castello and 19,000 employees—still as a cooperative but with a strong ambition to be #1 digital FMCG.

The challenge

As a FMCG, Arla was constrained to production. They produce high quality dairy products and someone else distributes and sells to the consumers. But Arla wanted more. Over a decade ago, Arla transformed the Danish recipe institution Karolines Køkken (meaning Karolines Kitchen), by taking the cookbooks from grandma’s old shelves and transforming them into revitalized digital editions. In 2018, we took it even further. As the very first FMCG, Arla broke out of their constraints by providing their visitors the opportunity to buy the recipes on the spot, all with the addition of a seemingly simple button.

Transforming Arla

With the addition of the "Add to basket" button on the iconic recipes, Arla transformed their business from being a FMCG with no real sales contact with the end consumer to directly facilitating the sales of their products. Convenient not only for consumers but naturally also for Arla. By enabling their 25 million yearly visitors to buy the recipe ingredients on the spot, they’ve transformed these visitors into buyers. This made for a more complete Customer Experience and a golden opportunity for increased sales for Arla. Everyone wins.

A Complex Solution Behind a Simple Button

Arla Foods

To deliver this seemingly simple button, Arla and Valtech strongly focused on the customer experience, particularly with the flow of purchase. Together, we found the answers through countless deliberations and questions such as "How do we integrate with the retailer?", "How do we make it clear when the customer is at Arla’s or the retailer’s site?" and "How do we create a scalable concept?"

On top of that, we also built a matching engine to ensure the best possible match between the ingredients in the recipes and the groceries at the retailer. This ensures a good experience when the groceries are delivered as well.

It may sound simple, but consider these questions: How many slices do you get from a lemon? How many kilograms are in a tablespoon of sugar?
These are critical questions when comparing old recipes based on slices and tablespoons with the data structure used at retailers.

Arla adapted all their recipes so the matching engine can compare it to the data Valtech registered from the retailer—leaving the consumers with only one lemon in their basket, even though they’ve selected three recipes containing a slice of lemon.

Becoming a More Digital Organization

The button does not only represent a change on the recipe pages. It also provided a major organizational change, transforming the mindset of the entire organization and opening their eyes to the commercial potential of the digital platform.

Scalable in Every Sense

Valtech has created a scalable solution in every sense, enabling Arla to scale it to any other country. And with the matching engine in place, it’s likewise easy to integrate more retailers and providing even greater options for consumers.

Results

Arla Foods

Within months of the launch, with no advertising or communications done on the brand new solution, consumers took it upon themselves to welcome this new opportunity. Accordingly, Arla has seen conversion rates reaching 0.1% of the total traffic. With 25 million visits per year, that’s an impressive number already. However, Arla expects this number to go even higher once their communications and advertising efforts are set into play.

The expectation is to reach 0.5% of visitors within a year of going live. In converted baskets, that would result in 125,000 purchased baskets with an expected average value of +25 euros. That’s a nice value added to the connected retailers as well.

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