January 23, 2018

Baking Mad

An Immersive Digital Baking Utopia For The Silver Spoon Company

The Challenge

Digital Baking Utopia for The Silver Spoon Company, part of Associated British Foods, a diversified international food, ingredients and retail group. Their portfolio of brands are leaders in the categories that they operate in and include Billington’s unrefined cane sugars, Allinson flours, and Nielsen-Massey vanillas and flavours.

The team appointed Ridgeway to craft and evolve the Baking Mad website as part of a long-term partnership. Silver Spoon were looking for a secure website that put users first, with fully integrated engaging content and ecommerce capability.

The Strategy

The recipe platform is a unique brand experience and sets out to bring together a community of people who have one thing in common – a love of baking. By creating this digital utopia for bakers of all levels, Silver Spoon can subtlety build a loyal brand following and sell through the desire to bake with only the best ingredients.

The site also offers tips and techniques to help people become better and more experienced bakers. It offers users engaging content and aims to promote a higher frequency of baking amongst its community.

Immersive Experience

Baking Mad wanted an immersive digital experience where bakers could indulge and explore their passion with rich content including recipes, tips and insights for bakers with varying levels of experience. The aim of the website is to bring people together, creating a strong community of baking lovers.

The website needed to be intuitive and easy to use with strong search functionality and features to make the art of baking an enjoyable and stress-free pastime.

Ecommerce

Additionally, the Baking Mad website now features a unique online shop where users can purchase baking kits for different celebratory occasions. The kits aim to make baking a breeze with all the correct quantities of ingredients, the right baking equipment and all the necessary accessories. Customers also have the option to purchase extras to make planning their party a piece of cake with matching themed party bags, hats, napkins and much more. Every parent’s dream!

The Baking Mad team saved time and budget on the build of their online shop with our exclusive Kentico Ecommerce Accelerator which uses tried and tested ecommerce functionality as a foundation. The product provides enhanced functionality over the core Kentico product and enables us to deliver projects faster and at lower cost than our competitors.

Search

The website needed sophisticated search functionality so users can find the recipes and content they want quickly and easily.

Ridgeway used the Kentico Document Event Handler to integrate with Microsoft Azure Search. This enables information to pass from four data types – products, recipes, articles and baking tips. When any changes are made to any one of these data sets Azure is updated in real time. The Microsoft Azure Search functionality returns results incredibly fast with accuracy which provides a better user experience.

Features

Our UX team worked with Baking Mad to identify key personas and compelling user journeys to create intuitive navigation and a website that bakers love to browse and bake from. Some key features and functionality include a print option, where the user can decide which parts of the recipe to print, for example, key info, the image, the ingredients, the utensils, or method.

The website features a ‘bake mode’ for those wishing to follow a recipe online. This feature displays the recipes in easy-to-follow steps using a large, simple-to-read font. Users can easily scroll through each step of the recipe. They can even select the ‘keep screen on’ feature which means the users’ tablet or mobile does not go into sleep mode halfway through a bake.

The Results

In the four-month period after launch compared to the previous period we have seen the following:

  • 19 per cent increase in pageviews
  • 14 per cent increase in sessions
  • 12 per cent increase in tablet traffic.

The result is a safe and secure website built on Kentico which brings together a community of bakers through engaging content, which raises awareness of both the Baking Mad and partner products. The website also provides a platform for Baking Mad to effectively sell their newly launched products.

In the two-month period after the launch of the online shop on 21 August 2017 in phase two of the project, it has received nearly 9000 pageviews and nearly 7000 unique pageviews.