Background:
Distributing the finest tomato products both nationally and internationally, Red Gold maintains its headquarters in Elwood, IN and distributes products from three processing plants throughout the state. Red Gold has been producing quality tomato products since 1942; the company remains family owned and has grown to encompass a wide body of brands and products, distributed throughout the world.
Through its four brands—Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento—Red Gold produces premium-quality canned tomatoes and tomato-based products for retail, foodservice, private brands and club stores. Here are a few fun facts about Red Gold:
- Their warehouses store enough cans to reach the moon and back!
- The company sells 90% of private label ketchup nationally.
- Tuttorosso and Redpack tomato products are the numbers one and two most popular brands in NY.
- Red Gold distributes products in all 50 states and in 16 countries.
Several years ago, Red Gold had a website designed for their family of brands that had served them well. But the content management system was antiquated, and Red Gold had only limited access to change recipes, and edit a limited amount of existing information. They could not add pages nor could they access every part of the site to make changes.
They approached BoxCrush to improve their overall design, increase the site’s functionality, and provide a content management system that would be intuitive and comprehensive. The company needed a complete design overhaul and an enterprise-wide technology upgrade.
Dan Finney, president of BoxCrush explains, “Red Gold’s internal marketing department needed the capability to update the entire site. They wanted a CMS that would allow them access to every part of the site, while limiting access for certain users. For example, they wanted foodservice personnel to be able to access and change that portion of the website, while limiting their access to that section only. The company also wanted the website to be more visually exciting and stimulating, with its four product brands presented in a distinct yet complementary fashion.”
Challenges:
The Red Gold website is very robust, encompassing the corporate website and four distinct brands: Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento. Each brand needed its own look and feel, yet with a cohesive overall design. BoxCrush chose Sitefinity as the platform for the new web design. “Red Gold was using Microsoft technologies and Windows servers, so using Sitefinity (which is built on ASP.NET) allowed us to stay in a similar platform. It also enabled us to provide a great deal of customization to the site.”
Part of the challenge of this website was transferring a large amount of information from one platform to another, without losing search engine rankings in the process. In all, 168 static pages, 81 news articles, 70 PDFs, 500 recipes, and 140 product descriptions needed to be migrated to the new website, every page with redirects from the old pages URLs to the new URLs to preserve search rank and customer bookmarks.
In addition to the ability to offer customized modules, Sitefinity was chosen because of its capability to handle news, blogs, image management, videos, documents and forms. “There was no advantage in this case to using open source technology, because most of the things Red Gold needed had to be custom built anyway,” continued Dan.
Sitefinity also offers a better level of security and granular control over their content. As mentioned earlier, the company needed multiple people to be able to access the backend of the website, and yet limit that access to certain portions of the website. Sitefinity has that capability.