Maple Leaf Foods Corporate Website
Maple Leaf Foods’ Digital Transformation: A New Era of Corporate Engagement
Maple Leaf Foods has over 100 years of history focused on offering high-quality, healthy and great-tasting protein products under leading brands such as Maple Leaf, Maple Leaf Prime, Schneiders and Greenfield Natural Meat. On the journey to be the most sustainable company on earth, the organisation aims to transform the food industry by sharing excellent examples of practices of safety, humanity and care for the environment.
Proud to be the first major carbon-neutral food company in the world, Maple Leaf Foods supports 12 high-impact environmental projects across North America that help bring the company’s carbon footprint to zero.
The Challenge
Maple Leaf Foods wanted a new corporate website that would combine design and functionality and facilitate the company’s editorial flow, allowing the sharing of reports, news, and job opportunities and inviting users to delve deeper into their ideals of responsibility towards the environment and the company’s consumers, customers and investors.
The Power of Gutenberg
The new corporate site was designed by the creative partner Sid Lee and developed by Trew Knowledge. From scratch, the development included transitioning from the previous website builder to the WordPress Gutenberg editor so that the new site would support the most different pages, publishing and media sharing styles across many sections. For that, TK has developed several blocks, plugins and custom patterns – some of them are listed below:
– The card component block was created to be used through the different layouts and is the most used custom block on the website. Versatile and reusable, it brings layout style options, alignment options, grid structure options, image and text settings, and different heading styles. It gives the editor the ability to hide all the elements to match the editor with the front-end.
– The media block is one of the more robust customized blocks from the Maple Leaf Corporate site. With two variations of usability – downloads and media – it provides a user-friendly interface to facilitate building the media pages across the website. According to the selected filter, the media variation pulls in news releases and speeches’ posts information. It contains left filters to dynamically modify content on the page and right filters to lead users to download pages. The downloads variation allows the editor to add images, upload videos, select card styles, and edit labels. Both variations enable admins to add as many custom filters as desired.
– The brands block was developed to display all Maple Leaf Brands brands in a list, pulling in dynamically the logo, title, excerpt, and link information from all the brand’s custom post types. The solution aims to provide the user with the freedom not to worry about adding each brand’s information manually when needed or having to modify the brands block content each time a single brand is updated.
– The reports block was developed to allow the editor to add one or multiple reports to a page. Each report is an accordion and can have any number of rows. Each row contains the report title, date, and optional buttons. The reports block, when combined with others, enhances the block capabilities and provides an efficient and organized way for displaying Maple Leaf Foods corporate reports, which are an essential resource of the new website.
– The media archives block provides a quick and uncomplicated way to display media archives without building each one individually. It shows news release posts in chronological order. By default, it displays six posts grouped by year. The block is primarily dynamic, pulling in each post’s date, category, title, and link, and the editor only needs to enter the latest button link.
The Results
– The brand new Maple Leaf Foods corporate website was launched in April 2022, combining clean design and unmatched customized solutions to support the company’s high flow of editorial publication and provide the user with accessible communication and easy-to-navigate pages, including the following:
Our Commitments: The page invites users to learn about Maple Leaf Foods’ commitment to people, animals, the environment, and good and healthy food. The robust Maple Leaf Foods’ Sustainability Report is one of the page’s features and brings extensive documentation about the sustainable changes the company has been making through the years.
Stories: The page guides the user through Maple Leaf Foods’ life and history, showcasing stories that relate the brand to its purpose and values.
Careers: The page presents the company’s culture and invites visitors to seek career opportunities in many areas and different locations.
Locations: Speaking of locations, users can explore a map with the 25+ Maple Leaf Foods facilities across North America.
Brands: The page presents Maple Leaf Foods’ leading brands and the 21 other brands part of the company’s portfolio.
– The new website shares the same network of greenfieldmeat.com and mapleleaf.ca in a multisite installation. The Maple Leaf Foods corporate website is set up in English and French versions like the other two.
– The integration with the SaaS solution SiteImprove helps improve accessibility, SEO, and quality assurance scores for flawless content and monitor the site for broken links.
