Marel is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of food processing machinery. They sell over 500 different products and solutions to food processors in multiple industries all around the world.

Marel’s web presence was fragmented, with multiple different websites across different industries, services and countries. So one of our biggest challenges was showcasing all the different things Marel offers on one website with a unified look and feel, while making sure each industry and service kept their unique identity. In 15 languages. All customizable.

Another big challenge was bringing Marel’s vast and complex product, solution, software and service offerings closer to their customers, as previous websites often required customers digging through 4-5 sub-pages to get to core product and solution offerings.

To unite the different industries and services Marel offers, we faced two main challenges.

Firstly, we had to align the product and solution offerings of Marel’s three main industries, Poultry, Meat and Fish.

Secondly, we wanted to elevate services such as Marel’s Software department, which lived on an entirely different website, and it’s Service offering, which was buried on sub-pages within each industry.

In efforts to align Marel’s three industries product offerings and simplify their structure, we looked for similarities between them.

We came up with the idea of making a simplified graphic of a factory, something most food processors would recognize. We partnered up with THANK YOU studios to create these beautiful 3d graphics in collaboration with each industries’ stakeholders, trying to strike a balance between the simplified and accurate.

With a website as big as Marel’s, with thousands of pages worth of different products and content, design each page can quickly go out of hand. Also, Marel wanted to be able to grow and maintain the website themselves after launch, without having to involve a designer or developer.

Our solution was a completely modular design system. We designed and developed over 40 sections that could be reused and rearranged anywhere on the website to create unique landing pages, sub pages, product pages and any other type of page. Every section was carefully designed to work both independently, and in harmony with each other.

What we ended up with was a super flexible, powerful and robust system for the content editors to use to make all of Marel’s content come to life. This would be the websites blessing, and it’s curse. While the content editors would constantly surprise us with some really slick looking sub pages, some sections got misused in ways we couldn’t have imagined and some purposeful combinations of sections were rearranged after launch, making for some ugly ones.

To help Marel’s visitors navigate quickly and efficiently through a web as big as theirs, we focused our efforts in making a powerful search at the forefront of the new website.

The search experience is driven by intelligent suggestions, that guides customers to the product, solution, service og that piece of information they seek. The suggestions can be based on what other customers search for, what’s currently trending on the website, or curated by Marel to drive sales or push relevant information.

While a powerful search is great, nothing can replace a good ol’ mega menu. So we made one. And we think it’s pretty great.