Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI) Multilingual Redesign

Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI) Multilingual Redesign

We have a global food supply chain and can source food and food ingredients from anywhere in the world, presenting enormous opportunities for the food industry. However, this also presents challenges in protecting consumers and ensuring food safety, security, and quality across the globe.

That’s where the Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI) comes in. SQFI is a global standards-making body and division of FMI – The Food Industry Association that works on behalf of the entire industry to advance a safer, healthier and more efficient consumer food supply chain. SQFI offers globally recognized food safety and quality certification programs to meet industry, customer, and regulatory requirements for all sectors of the food supply chain. The SQF Program extends across the globe, with a community of 13,000+ certified sites in over 40 countries across 6 continents.

To better serve the needs of their global audience and to support their aggressive growth and strategic vision, the SQFI team knew they needed to overhaul their website. SQFI turned to Matrix Group, their longtime digital partner, to help them reimagine their critical user journeys, develop a true multilingual strategy and framework for their content, and rebuild their site from the ground up.

CLIENT
Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI)

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Sitefinity

SERVICES
Multilingual Strategy Consulting
User Experience
Web Design
Custom Development
Integration
Search Engine Optimization

The Challenge

The primary goal for this project was to increase awareness, conversions, and transactions to their offerings across global markets, and to support the cultivation, education, and enable adoptions of their SQF Program. 

On their previous website, the journey to become certified needed to be clearer and more cohesive. Customers had a difficult time exploring and identifying how to get started with their food safety certification process and which program was right for them. In addition, translations weren’t available for all of the content, and some pages were a mix of English and other languages. This provided a poor and confusing user experience for their global audience. 

The food safety community seeks manufacturing certification and training for a variety of reasons to ensure their trading partners receive the highest quality ingredients, packaging, and finished products.

Considering the need for highly accurate and precise translation of highly technical terms, both the SQFI and Matrix Group teams knew that the multilingual component would be one of the most challenging aspects of this project. The team knew that web browser translators wouldn’t be powerful or accurate enough for the SQF specialized content, search wouldn’t work without a multilingual index of the website, and they would also have to contend with multilingual forms, email campaigns, and staff responses to inquiries.

The Solution

The redesign was a 9-month process that included:

  • Surveys and interviews with customers and non-customers to find out how customer journeys could be simplified, terminology for different components of the program, their pain points, and how to delight them.
  • A complete website navigation rethink, especially since SQFI has multiple audiences: growers, food manufacturers, grocery stores, food safety professionals, and certification bodies.
  • A new, compelling design that captured the SQF mission, values, global reach, and food safety promise.
  • Implementing the whole site in a new content management system – Sitefinity.
  • A multilingual strategy where the standards are manually translated but the rest of the site is AI-translated using AWS Translate. 
  • New directories to help customers find certification bodies and training centers.
  • A new Code Selector tool that helps companies select the modules, Codes, and resources that are most applicable to their facilities.
  • Streamlined search for training options that clarify training courses and help the user better determine which training is right for them. 

The new website:

  • Is now fully available in 9 languages! Customers can navigate the site in English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Italian, Japanese, French, and Portuguese. 
  • Features a Code Selector that makes it easier for companies to determine which SQF program is right for them.
  • Makes it easy to find a certification body (CB) in a given region because the CB search is always up to date AND available in the user’s language.
  • Offers a clearer and streamlined process to becoming certified.
  • Facilitates easier access to highly sought content related to food safety, e.g., Tip Sheets, Checklists, Guidance Documents etc.
  • Amplifies SQFI’s mission, vision, and offerings through a beautiful and cohesive design.

The Result

The new website launched in early October 2023 and is receiving rave reviews from staff and customers alike. Customer service representatives are reporting fewer calls about finding things on the website, and the business development team says customers and prospects alike are appreciating the content in the 9 languages. 

In addition, the website analytics is telling us that overall traffic is up by about 25% and SQFI staff now know how much multilingual traffic is coming in, and which pages are generating interest. For example, in Mexican Spanish, the most popular page is the training page, the Code Selector is the most popular page among French speakers, and so far, there is little traffic to the Italian pages (not surprising, given that the Italian market is a new market for SQFI).

“Matrix Group was the perfect partner for this project because every step of the way they stuck to our true north—creating a simple user experience for a global audience. We’d work out a user experience in English, then ask the question, “How do we do this in eight other languages?”, scratch our heads for a while, and then Matrix Group would come to the table with an elegant solution that delivered.”

— Kelli Windsor, Senor Director, Web & Digital Communications, FMI—The Food Industry Association