King Arthur Flour crowns new digital customer experience as online sales grow

The country’s oldest flour brand is meeting increased consumer demand with an enhanced direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform.

With site traffic up 260% and e-commerce sales increasing 200% during the COVID-19 pandemic, King Arthur Flour needed to quickly update its website. The company’s existing site wasn’t built to host dynamic, personalized content that changed with the consumer’s needs.

King Arthur Flour partnered with digital agency Third and Grove and digital content management company Acquia to revamp its site. Upgrades included integrating content and commerce so the company’s 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 scaled its cloud infrastructure to meet unpredictable traffic surges from stay-at-home customers seeking baking-related products and content. 

While such traffic surges typically happen around the holidays, pandemic baking has exceeded holiday demand on a more sustained basis. King Arthur Flour’s sourdough starter page had 2.5 million page views from mid-March through May the end of May. In contrast, in 2019, total page views sitewide the day before Thanksgiving (a major traffic day) were 955,000.

In addition, using its new digital platform, the King Arthur Flour brand has been able to experiment with content such as its “Homebound Baking Guide” shows hosted by King Arthur’s leading bakers as well as celebrity bakers. This page was built solely by digital marketing staff without technical assistance. So far, it has been seen close to 10 million times across the company’s digital and web channels.

“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.”