Butterball

The Client

Headquartered in Garner, North Carolina, Butterball is one of the best-known and most loved brands of turkey in the U.S. For more than 60 years, the company has provided food service and retail products to customers and consumers around the world. As an industry leader in quality, food safety, and animal well-being, the company employs numerous processes to ensure the health of flocks and implements recognized prevention measures to exceed food safety standards. Butterball products are currently distributed throughout the U.S. and in more than 45 countries. Butterball operates six processing plants located in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Missouri.

The Situation

A brand within Butterball LLC, Farm to Family by Butterball raises turkeys with no antibiotics ever and with healthy diets designed to give them the nutrients they need. Butterball wanted to reinforce the relationship of its Farm to Family by Butterball brand within the primary Butterball site while still preserving Farm to Family's unique identity, look and feel, and product differences. 

The Challenge

Butterball faced challenges in promoting its Farm to Family brand. Specifically, it wanted to rehome the site into its primary Butterball.com domain. It also wanted to reuse existing Butterball site architecture and components, creating a site that a Butterball visitor would find familiar but still reflective of the Farm to Family brand.

The Solution

Butterball partnered with VMLY&R to build a complete site to support all Farm to Family by Butterball content while minimizing any need for brand-new features or components. Working together, the teams leveraged current Butterball styles whenever possible with the least changes required to the site theme to match the new Farm to Family designs. Butterball and VMLY&R worked together using Figma to keep creative and technical components in sync. 

VMLY&R also used existing search architecture to create API endpoints, allowing for the display of cross-site search results from both Butterball and Farm to Family by Butterball. The team also built a Drupal multisite, making special configurations to house the Farm to Family by Butterball site as a subdirectory of the existing Butterball domain while serving a completely different theme and database. Every layout within the site was built with existing Butterball components in Drupal, and then targeted changes were made to CSS to update the components with the Farm to Family by Butterball look and feel. 

Thanks to Drupal, pre-existing Butterball components could be seamlessly integrated into the Farm to Family by Butterball multisite. VMLY&R’s development team leveraged the identical libraries sourced from Butterball, albeit on the Farm to Family by Butterball platform, to streamline the process of creating a completely new theme, necessitating primarily modifications to the color palette and typography.

The Results

The teams successfully launched the new site within four months. VMLY&R and Butterball used Acquia Cloud Platform and its collection of solutions to facilitate a simple deployment via pipelines, providing easily accessible environments for remote teams and allowing teams to quickly make updates and changes needed to successfully launch a new website. 

With Drupal, VMLY&R and Butterball were able to migrate its Farm to Family visual identity into a new site under the Butterball domain, all while using the existing suite of Butterball components and styles and building upon the existing architecture. This significantly reduced the need to build new features and allowed for a much faster launch of the new site.