Digital transformation for a British culinary icon, driven by a passion for creating a healthier, happier world—one delicious meal 🍝 at a time.
The Jamie Oliver Group is a global food company founded by renowned chef, restauranteur and cookbook author Jamie Oliver. By building a community around food, they aim to bring joy to mealtimes with simple and easy-to-follow recipes. This growing brand has a clear mission: to inspire healthier choices and create a healthier world through food.
They needed support to bring all of these experiences together under one digital destination. Management consultancy Zebra Associates identified the need and case for digital transformation within the group, and sought a strategic digital partner to deliver this.
Following an in-depth Discovery process to understand the brand, we defined a strategic vision and roadmap to deliver a best-in-class digital experience that empowered users through thoughtful content and UX. To achieve this, we focused on two key goals... 1: welcome more busy cooks and cooking lovers to the brand: Actively increase the visitor base through targeted marketing, improved SEO and a broader brand proposition. 2: Engage customers beyond the recipes: Optimise content, design and interactivity to encourage user engagement and improve customer retention.
We are working with Rotate° to build an exciting and high performing digital product that will help us deliver our brand promise of better and more joyful mealtime moments to our global customers.
Revitalising a British Icon: Jamie Oliver’s Design System
The Jamie Oliver team rightly wanted to bring their content to the forefront with a sleek but pared-back website that highlighted the seasonality, vibrancy, and personality of their delicious content.
Our design focused on integrating the brand’s signature colors, typography, and iconography to create a distinctive, cohesive user experience. As part of this we added some elegant curves for a soft yet modern aesthetic, and introduced a custom typeface that paired bold, curvy headlines with condensed, precise subheadings, for both flavour and function.
We developed a modular design system that formed the foundation for the site’s key user journeys. This system offered content teams the flexibility to craft vibrant and engaging recipes and food stories, while ensuring everything stayed on-brand and maintainable at scale.
Search at the Heart of the Experience
We found that many journeys began with searches, as busy cooks or food lovers are typically in a rush to get to the information quickly. We wanted to make a best-in-class search and elevate the user experience to allow for better discovery and a more simplified user experience. This was reflected with the UX choices, having the search bar omnipresent.
To power their search engine, we selected Algolia to generate lightning-fast, in-depth and accurate search results on the site. By leveraging one of the most powerful search engines on the market, we can utilise a complete suite of features and detailed analytics, as well as AI-powered predictive search, personalisation and recommendations.
Research. Test. Learn.
An overhaul of the information architecture (IA) allowed the site to accommodate a broader range of content, surfacing valuable insights from across the business. This improvement was reflected in a new navigation structure, which included two fresh categories: “Jamie’s World,” featuring content from the brand’s other channels, and “Inspiration,” offering everything from nutritional recipes and “how-to” guides to Jamie Oliver’s Cookbook Club.
All Design solutions were validated through user testing, focusing specifically on the mobile experience to understand and monitor how easily users could find desired recipes, products and the like, and what was causing friction along the journey.
Serving Up a CMS Fit For Purpose
The Jamie Oliver team needed an intuitive CMS that gave them the flexibility to curate content for a number of use cases, as well as ingest a catalogue of over 3,500 recipes.
CMS platform Sanity was the best fit for the brand’s growing needs. Its powerful API and integration capabilities makes it easy to connect with other services, while custom workflows and extensibility streamlined content management. Essentially a custom page builder, this has given Jamie Oliver’s content teams the flexibility to craft vibrant and engaging stories whilst maintaining clear brand guidelines.
Through Sanity, admins can now encourage customer engagement beyond the recipe page. Additional content blocks with smart suggestions such as inspiration for using left-over ingredients to reduce food waste, decorate the high-trafficked recipe pages to drive engagement depth. Similarly, modules link to other areas of the Jamie Oliver world including recipe books, restaurants, and the Cookery School, improving the discoverability of the other experiences the Group has to offer.
Inbox Detox: Upgrading Email for a Healthier Strategy
As part of the architectural transformation, Klaviyo was selected as the platform to enable Jamie Oliver's team to elevate their email marketing strategy, providing more advanced personalisation and automation capabilities. As a critical channel for business success, email allows direct, tailored communication with customers, driving higher engagement through improved segmentation with an aim for stronger brand loyalty. With Klaviyo’s platform, the team have gained deeper insights into customer behaviour, leading to more targeted and timely campaigns.
This transition resulted in improved engagement rates, and the capabilities to deliver a more tailored communication experience to their large audience, whilst also streamlining the email team's workflows for greater efficiency.
Global Rollout Minimising SEO Impact
Maintaining organic search integrity as we managed a rollout of a new site was paramount, and a primary measure of success for the project. In over a decade, JamieOliver.com had become a important destination for food and drink recipes, competing with other digital giants in this space. Protecting the equity which had been built up over time required a strategy minimised any short-term impact to ranks, whilst creating an improved foundation for the future.
With an improved navigation, folder structure, internal linking, re-directs and on-page schema we had a new information architecture and adopted SEO best practice integral to the new design. This then had to be balanced with a staggered rollout to mitigate any risk.
This involved an sequential audience split rollout of traffic from 1%, 5%, 25%, 50% across two weeks, where we could monitor the SEO performance and impact, to ensure any impact was minimal as the search algorithms re-calibrated to the new site architecture.
By blending innovative technology with creative design, we’re thrilled to have crafted a more engaging destination for Jamie fans and foodies alike. This sets the stage for more exciting developments to come in their digital transformation...
This partnership marks an exciting step towards transforming JamieOliver.com into a unified brand destination. As part of a broader digital transformation, this project phase has laid the foundation for future growth and innovation, aligning with the group’s long-term goals and enhancing engagement with a global audience.
Key Results
With the split-tested rollout of the new experience, we saw the following results:
Engagement rate: +30% improvement
Bounce Rate: –25% reduction
Average customer rating: 4/5
Tech Stack
CMS – Sanity 
Search – Algolia 
ESP – Klaviyo 
Hosting – Netlify 
Caching – Cloudflare
Identity – Auth0