Securing a scalable content solution for growth: Paulig & Contentful

When I say to you the term ‘family business’ I assume that one of the first things that come to mind is a mom-and-pop shop with a local market share and strong customer service. 

However, some family businesses rocket out of the local market and spread around the world.  

One of these is the Finnish family-owned food and drink company Paulig that was setup all the way back in 1876. 

Its brands include Poco Loco, Gold&Green, Santa Maria, and of course Paulig and operates in 13 countries. 

The Finnish multinational sells a bundle of products from quality coffee and spices to plant-based products. Yet it increasingly began to be concerned that its content management system was aging and failing to scale to fit the needs of the company.

To boost its digital experience across its website and ecommerce store, Paulig needed to shift away from its existing tech and find new solutions. 

“There’s always the possibility to find better technology instead of just moving to the newest version of the old solution,” said Antti Lauronen, the director of creative and digital at Paulig. “We wanted to put more effort into buying and enhancing different elements affecting the buying experience.” 

The company initiated a broad-scoped planning phase to first analyze the company’s needs and then the potential digital solutions. It soon became obvious that scalability was an essential aspect moving forward. 

“As project owners, we took a bold stance and chose scalable solutions to fit our organization’s needs now and in the future,” said Antti. “We don’t want to anchor our services on a monolith but rather a solution that we can build up.” 

In addition to scalability, next upon the checklist was for the platform to be headless. 

“Headless is a modern way of doing things,” added Antti, “which is exactly what we want. It’s important that we don’t paint ourselves into a corner. With other solutions, we’d be more contained. We chose a path with sustainable technologies that can be developed easily.” 

Paulig decided to replatform to the headless CMS Contentful. 

Extending their capabilities 

Once the tech was set up, it was time for content creators and developers to begin the learning curve. Moving away from a traditional content management system and towards a headless platform, after all, inevitably comes with a learning curve. 

During the Contentful learning process, their workers had easy access to workshops and courses. They soon realized how intuitive and user-friendly the platform was.

“Technology can simplify and enhance operations – which is important to make the big picture work,” said Iina, a worker for the agency that Paulig cooperated with. 

Now, content teams can work independently on projects without the need of developers or can collaborate with dev teams to carry out projects. 

Paulig’s global team works across 13 countries and multiple time zones. As of today, its developers have already built 38 reusable content types. 

“If we built this three years ago,” added Antti, “we wouldn’t have focused so much on expansion and collaboration possibilities. Now we have a clear idea that all brands, products and solutions belong on the same platform – one we can adjust technically to fit our ways of working within the organization.” 

A pilot of Paulig’s new Contentful-powered ecommerce store proved very positive among its customers. “While Paulig’s new site is gorgeous,” added Iina, “there’s a lot under the hood to enable future development.” 

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful dev shops. Contact us to see how we can work together.