La Lorraine Bakery Group is a leading European bakery group specializing in the production and distribution of bakery products. They supply a wide range of fresh and frozen bread products, pastries, patisseries, and snacks to other businesses in foodservice, retail, and artisanal markets.
Having a wide range of products is one thing; selling them is another. It’s crucial that your products (especially online) are well-presented and equipped with the right information in the places where end-users make their purchases.
La Lorraine Bakery Group Belgium sought advice from GROUP7 on enhancing their online visibility and accessibility in foodservice wholesalers.
The challenge
In foodservice, wholesalers serve as a crucial link. Professional end-users (chefs, owners, bakers, etc.) primarily purchase their products here, largely through online platforms. For many of our foodservice clients, the majority of their sales come from wholesaler webshops. Hence, it’s pivotal for every manufacturer that their products are easily findable within the wholesaler’s webshop.
Despite a manufacturer’s efforts, if their product pages on the wholesaler’s website aren’t presented well, it can lead to a significant loss —research shows that 69% of visitors leave a webshop page due to insufficient product information.
The solution
What should a perfect webshop look like then? Our standpoint is that a perfect online store enables customers to find the right products in the correct categories, presented in the best possible way to influence purchasing behavior.
Leveraging our knowledge and experience, we know what constitutes a perfect product name. What should and shouldn’t be included in a description, and other crucial aspects to highlight for your product.
La Lorraine Bakery Group realized that their products weren’t receiving the attention they deserved in wholesaler webshops. Despite this channel being where most of their revenue was generated. For instance, they are market leaders in baguettes, yet the baguettes of La Lorraine and Panesco were hardly among the top search results.
Therefore, it was time to ensure that La Lorraine Bakery Group’s products, when accessed by end-users via webshops, were presented in the best possible way, in the right places!
We often observe that internally, there isn’t always enough time or personnel to thoroughly check and monitor these aspects. Hence, GROUP7 developed the Perfect Store Check, through which we aided La Lorraine Bakery Group.
The result
We reviewed the product pages of over 30 products across 5 wholesalers. This assessment encompassed not only LLBG’s products but also several others for a comprehensive benchmark. Each product was evaluated on 14 different aspects. Does the product have the correct item name? Is there a good description accompanying the product? Is all legally required information available? Additionally, we explored the wholesaler’s webshop capabilities and identified areas where immediate or indirect improvements could be made.
To ensure practical applicability, for each wholesaler, we produced a concise report summarizing our findings through the Perfect Store Check
For La Lorraine Bakery Group, we delivered the first phase of the Perfect Store Check—5 comprehensive reports These were discussed in a workshop to collectively determine the next steps.
However, the journey isn’t complete yet! Now that we have insights into the current state of products at wholesalers and have identified areas for improvement, it’s time for action. While we provided LLBG with guidance for implementing improvements, the actual execution of changes requires intensive collaboration between the wholesaler and the manufacturer. The extent of optimization depends on the digital capabilities, willingness, and capacity of the wholesaler. While we provided LLBG with guidance for implementing improvements, the actual execution of changes requires intensive collaboration between the wholesaler and the manufacturer. This doesn’t happen overnight; by making clear agreements and managing expectations (what’s realistically achievable), the desired outcome is attained.
Together with LLBG, we’ve learned two valuable lessons that we’d like to share with manufacturers embarking on similar projects:
- An optimized external webshop starts with internally maintaining product databases with standardized descriptions and images.
- Subsequently, discussions with wholesalers are crucial to determine possibilities and the need for customizations to achieve the desired optimizations.
Meanwhile, the presentation and findability of La Lorraine, Panesco, and Donut Worry Be Happy products have improved across several webshops.
Want to learn more about our perfect store journey? Read further >>