How Making Pet Food Matters (MPM) Took Control of Their Artwork Process with WebCenter QuickStart and Studio

Making Pet Food Matters (MPM) develops high-quality and innovative products for cats and dogs. The company was created in 2002 by founders Roger Wood, Roger Coleman, and Jon Kinsey. The trio was in agreement on their dissatisfaction with the quality of pet food available on the market, so they decided to make their own.

The recipes use high quality, recognizable ingredients that reflect the passion of the founders to challenge the traditional additive-filled products that some multinational brands offer to consumers. MPM consists of a variety of pet food brands, each with their own geographical and consumer focus.

• In 2006 Applaws was launched as a brand of high quality, 100% natural, ethically sourced premium pet food in specialty retailers across the UK. Applaws was targeted to knowledgeable cat and dog owners looking for the best products to nurture and reward their pets. Applaws also launched a world first – 80% grain free chicken dry food in 2009. Today the Applaws range has grown to nearly 200 natural recipes for cats and dogs.
• In 2008, Encore Pet Food was launched. It was originally for the UK grocery market but is now sold around the world to time-strapped yet welfare conscious consumers who seek to feed their cats and dogs the very best in natural nutrition.
• In late 2017, MPM launched Reveal into the food, drug, and mass channel in the USA, with a range of 10 cat SKU’s with limited ingredient, grain free recipes. Safeway was the first retailer to launch in over 200 stores in Northern California and has now grown further.

As consumer interest in premium pet food has grown, so has MPM. By 2013, MPM sold its 100 millionth unit of wet cat food worldwide. MPM brands are now sold in 49 markets worldwide with offices in the UK, Australia, and USA.

MPM rose up as a challenger in an established industry so they needed a way to stand out. They did this by focusing on modern marketing methods and increasing the amount of consumer insights they gathered to help them understand what messages would be meaningful and grab the attention of pet owners in their desired markets. They needed to be nimble and swift when it came to gathering insight and putting it into marketing action.

The differentiator for MPM is the quality of their product and ingredients so they needed to be able to display this through their packaging and marketing efforts.

“No matter which channel they use, our customer ultimately receives the same end product in their hands. MPM develops high-quality and innovative products for cats and dogs.” says Joy Stevenson, Project Manager at MPM.

Since MPM develops many brands for many audiences, they also work with several design agencies and over a dozen printers across the globe, in addition to creating or updating over a thousand digital assets each year.

Before using WebCenter QuickStart, they used PDFs, presentations, or written briefs with checklists to try to manage the critical points of each project. These materials were passed from person to person, making the approval process slow and prone to error.

They needed a solution to ensure that the right people were reviewing the right artworks, that the flow of work was managed in order to capture and complete the deadline with visibility into the status of each project at any time.

Their search ended when they found the solution with WebCenter QuickStart workflow management from Esko. Not only did it meet their immediate needs, but it was also the right solution for their future potential as well.

“The user interface was clean and simple. There was enough tailoring to be able to fit our needs now, but also a modular approach that would allow us to build for the future as needed. Esko came out on top on a number of factors. We were also really impressed by the team members we met, who were responsive, knowledgeable, and open, making several suggestions as to how the system might fit our needs,” says Nikki Prendergast, Programme Manager at MPM.

With WebCenter QuickStart, multiple users can review MPM artworks simultaneously, which speeds up the flow of review and allows users to easily highlight annotation areas, provide replacement text, and check barcodes and pantone colors; all in a single source.

The global marketing teams and technical and innovation teams are the most frequent users of WebCenter. In addition to speeding up the approval process, they immediately saw an impact by having instant visibility into projects, higher quality artwork, and increased productivity.

The team at MPM also saw an opportunity with Studio, the 3D design tool from Esko. They were able to use their increased productivity time to bring their CGIs in-house with the photo-realistic package renderings that they created with Studio.

“We’ve seen spend to outside agencies reduce as better briefing and faster turnaround means the team have capacity to handle more work overall. Where previously we were paying £50 per image for a CGI, using Esko Studio we can now create the vast majority of CGIs in-house, while providing more angles and better lighting options than before. We’ve seen a reduction in CGI costs of over 85% in 2019,” says Joy Stevenson, Project Manager at MPM.

As the team at MPM continues to use WebCenter and Studio, they gain a stronger control over their artwork management. Not only do they have full visibility into their processes, but they can now build on the work they’ve done before since they can easily recall past projects and assets in future workflows.

“As we’ve brought more work in-house, consistency has increased and we build on work done before – so being able to reference previous jobs in the system has been really useful for adapting artworks to new customers or markets and has allowed us to build a library of base artworks that can be built on as needed,” says Joy Stevenson, Project Manager at MPM.

As MPM continues to grow, they will continue to expand the tools that enhance their processes. One of the perks of works with a company like Esko is that there are always updated versions and new products focused on improving the creation of packaging, label, and marketing collateral.

“Esko has been a strong partner for us and will be considered for future projects where modules of the WebCenter program may be appropriate… The technology is intuitive to use and doesn’t require high levels of configuration – ideal for a growing company like us who are fairly early in our in-house artwork journey. Using a standardized system with minor tailoring allows us to understand how well our processes work and what changes we might want to make in the future while maintaining what’s successful, “ says Joy Stevenson, Project Manager at MPM.