Cloudinary Serves Tasty Images and Videos to Vorwerk’s Thermomix® Platform

Vorwerk relies on Cloudinary to manage and deliver high-quality images and videos fast and flawlessly to millions of Thermomix® customers using its “Cookidoo®” recipe platform. Hosting more than 66,000 digital recipes, Cookidoo® is available through the web and mobile applications and the new generation of Thermomix® smart kitchen appliances TM6, bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to life in the kitchen. With Cloudinary’s media experience platform, Vorwerk can deliver on its quality promise through compelling visual assets and a seamless global brand experience.

ABOUT

Vorwerk

Vorwerk & Co. KG was founded in Wuppertal, Germany in 1883 and is well known for its premier high-tech household appliances. Its flagship Thermomix® dates back to the 1960s. Since then, Thermomix® has taken kitchens by storm and today at least two appliances are sold every minute, generating net sales of around 1.27 billion Euros in 2019 all over the world. For many Thermomix® owners, Vorwerk’s Cookidoo® website and app is their go-to recipe platform.

THE CHALLENGE

Delivering Images and Videos on Myriad Devices, Globally

Visually appealing images and videos inspire amateur cooks to invest in its appliances and continually try out new recipes from Cookidoo®’s database of 66,000 tested dishes. Cookidoo®’s Guided Cooking function, takes users visually, step-by-step through each recipe. Short videos offer tips especially on more advanced recipe steps to make the cooking experience even easier. For all these reasons, delivering high-quality rich media content to the Cookidoo® websites, mobile applications and appliances is key.

“Our customers expect a premium quality experience in hardware and software. This includes high-end Cookidoo® visuals and fast page loading times on all our appliances,” explains Vorwerk’s Head of Digital Products Management, Stefan Motz. “To deliver best-in-class cooking experience to our customers, images and videos play an important role.”

Delivering this visual content fast, globally, to all appliances and websites, proved a considerable challenge. Vorwerk needed a content delivery network (CDN) to efficiently deliver images and videos across all the regions it serves. That’s a challenge particularly in one market, China, where content must be delivered through a local CDN.

In addition, IoT devices like its flagship Thermomix® appliance have special video codec requirements. Video generates a high amount of data so it must be compressed. To play back video smoothly for users, it needs to be delivered in a different resolution, bitrate, quality, and with adaptive streaming for uninterrupted buffering on all devices and bandwidth. Different use cases need different video variants, which takes time, resources, and technical skills to do it right, making for a complex situation that Vorwerk had to solve.

Finally, Vorwerk needed a solution that played well in its microservices architecture operated on Amazon EKS clusters and using technologies like Contentful for CMS and Algolia for search.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Automation, Custom Workflow, and Engaging Customer Experience

Cloudinary’s image and video management platform overcame all three hurdles. It solved the tough codec challenge by applying its algorithms, which automatically detect the end user’s device and browser and deliver video in the most optimal format and codec. There is no manual pre-creation or waiting, which means no resource bottlenecks that slow down the publishing process. This also ensures visual content loads quickly and plays smoothly for end users. Cloudinary’s codec knowledge was key to establishing the right setup for the Thermomix® appliances as well.

“From the beginning we had access to Cloudinary’s support team and its deep video knowledge and experience,” says Sebastian Röhren, Senior Solution Architect Digital R&D.

“They were very responsive, even on short notice. We had several web sessions with the experts to discuss these topics and work on customizations for our special requirements.”

Integrating Cloudinary with Vorwerk’s microservices architecture also proved a straightforward process. Finally, because it provides global CDN coverage through different providers, partnerships in China with Akamai and ChinaCache ensure coverage in that key market while Vorwerk’s content remains hosted in a European data center.

THE RESULTS

Exceptional Performance and Customer Experience, in All Environments

Vorwerk has earned a reputation in Germany and around the world for setting exceedingly high standards. It was imperative for the company to offer a visual brand experience for Cookidoo® across all the regions and devices where the recipe platform is available and supported.

Crucially, Cloudinary also enabled Vorwerk’s development team to deliver the best image and video quality that consumers in today’s visual economy demand:

“Thanks to Cloudinary we were able to automate our image and video workflow,“ says Röhren. “To provide the best customer experience, our teams like to play around with the broad set of capabilities that Cloudinary offers to transform media and optimize performance.”

These transformations ultimately make it easier for Vorwerk’s marketers to promote new recipe collections. The development team can easily resize and crop images, deliver them in the most efficient format, quality, and resolution, and/or apply filters and effects. Using Cloudinary, this all happens on the fly, enabling teams to be more autonomous while launching more content faster.

And there’s more brewing in the Vorwerk kitchen. The company is continuously working with Cloudinary’s support team to develop new capabilities. Stay tuned for more!