Mayrand revolutionise grocery market in Canada

Mayrand Food Depot is a Quebec food trade specialist since 1914 offering the widest assortment of food, kitchen items and packaging all under one roof.  Mayrand specialize in bulk grocery and continue to serve B2B professions of the food industry such as: Catering services & Restaurants, Day Care, Coffee and sandwich shop, Pizzeria, Dairy bar, Chocolate makers as well as B2C to individuals.

The food wholesaler had no online ecommerce presence to serve their growing customer base. They wanted to put this into place quickly to better serve their customers with several objectives in mind:

• Grow market share by showcasing Mayrand business key differentiators
• Simplify client experience for purchases
• Increase digital presence and attract new B2B clients
• Accelerate checkout flow
• Re-use the platform with sister companies

Having experience from other platforms, Mayrand was looking for a complete platform that would have easy to use CMS & Marketing features as well as integrated ecommerce functionalities all while maintaining top performance. For these reasons, the Optimizely Digital Experience Cloud was selected to build their new ecommerce platform in order to deliver and exceed consumer experience online and in-store.

The Ingredients to a Commerce Experience Accessible to All

• Accelerate growth - accelerate Mayrand Food Depot’s growth by highlighting the brand differentiators
• Accommodate to new, modern consumers – acquire a new type of modern grocery shoppers (mobile, quick)
• Simplify client experience for purchases - especially in the case of B2B where they already know their sku’s and want to order large quantities quickly or repeat orders
• Strengthen in-store traffic – reinforce and motivate drive to store traffic
• Increase digital presence - reinforce the brand and attract new B2B clients
• Futureproof digital solution - build the foundation for a long-term digital solution for multiple locations and banners in the company group

The Menu of Requirements

Mayrand required a platform with strong content management features for easy authoring and quick content modifications. In addition, the Canadian wholesaler required a powerful, flexible and robust ecommerce engine for their tens of thousands of sku’s and future store expansions plan with multi-site inventories and other companies in their banner.

With that, they would need the latest marketing features to personalize their B2B content to specific consumer markets.

After evaluating other platforms, Mayrand chose Optimizelyl Commerce Cloud, built on Microsoft Azure, to fulfil all their requirements. Coupling its multiple transactional features, including inventory management, with Optimizely's best-in-class Content Cloud hands Mayrand the power of content and ecommerce on a single platform.

The Route to Success

Mayrand and Yaksa had a challenge to deliver the new digital platform with full B2B & B2C ecommerce capabilities in just 6 months. Yaksa ran the definition phase workshops with Mayrand to determine quickly the key elements to build the foundation and also prioritize the features that would have to be there at launch. Mayrand’s Sophie Schwartz was very knowledgeable and had a vast experience in deploying ecommerce websites which helped a lot in focusing on the right parts of the implementation and taking quick decisions.

The team had to keep in mind that the integration with Mayrand’s ERP tool would be temporary as it was already planned to be changed within a year, hence influencing the architecture of the connection. The solution proved successful as Mayrand managed to switch ERP with no downtime on its eCommerce website.

By June 2019 the website was launched, and the target feature set was achieved.

Mayrand's Merchandising Magic

• My stockroom: Customers can browse Mayrand's product catalog with a personalised view of products previously bought.
• Loyalty: Users now register and renew online their loyalty card and start earning benefits immediately
• Featured Products: Allow merchandisers to boost positioning of specific products in browsing and search
• Predictive Search: Auto-complete search based on the current most popular search keyword that create sales conversions
• Scale & Perform: Built to perform and scale against high volume increase
• Personalized Pricing: Members can browse the site viewing and purchasing products with their eligible personalized prices and promotions
• Fulfilment Experience: Receive SMS and email updates about grocery orders, assembly and delivery status.