NatureSweet Tomatoes Website

Close your eyes. Imagine a vined tomato, perfectly ripe, glorious in bright sunshine, ready to be picked and devoured.

San Antonio-based NatureSweet tomatoes had those for real (and for you), but its website didn’t really deliver the sort of mouthwatering experience you could imagine. A company with a delicious product and a sweet story to tell needed a site that could do that.

NatureSweet’s existing dashboard-style site had a lot going on (an issue unto itself), and updates were few and far between; it was a difficult site to refresh and maintain. Strategy-wise, the site had good intentions, but the mission and hierarchy needed more focus.

We essentially started from scratch, boiling down the user experience vision to four major components that would be the pillars of a fresh, experiential site: the NatureSweet story, its growing process, recipes (which the existing site did not have), and, of course, the tomatoes themselves.

Three colors dominated the creative to provide a crisp, persistent brand personality throughout the new site – red (tomatoes), green (nature), and yellow (sunshine). A tomatoesque bumblebee was added to the mix to act as the site guide, providing tidbits of information along the way.

Here’s where things really started moving. The bee was originally a static image set to pop in at different points of the parallax scroll. Our proactive front-end developer took it further, using GreenSock and ScrollMagic tools to animate the little guy. The extra bit of action code work proved to be the cherry tomato on top for this project.

We cooked with Isotope to filter and sort the new recipe section, providing a smooth, easy path to dozens of snack, appetizer, and main-meal ideas using NatureSweet tomatoes.

And this snappy WordPress-boned site is easy to update, efficiently indexed, and search engine optimization golden.

NatureSweet asked us to create a site that was relevant, told its story, was easily managed and maintained, and secure. Like our collaboration, the result was fruitful.