Case Study: General Mills creates new consumer experiences with Microsoft Azure

General Mills - Customer Case Study

General Mills, a major food company, identified a significant challenge in meeting the needs of the gluten-free community. Consumers struggled to locate both products and information, so the company's New Ventures group sought to create a new direct-to-consumer channel. They partnered with Consumer Goods Technology vendor BrandJourney Venturing and decided to utilize the Microsoft Windows Azure platform to develop a cloud-based solution that would avoid the high costs of traditional on-premise IT.

The solution implemented was the Gluten Freely website, a one-stop shop built using Microsoft tools like Visual Studio, .NET Framework, and SQL Azure. Developed by the vendor and its partners in just six months, the site offered over 400 products, recipes, and community forums. The results were immediate and overwhelming, with orders from over 25 states on the first day. The cloud-based platform provided a strong foundation for future ventures, significantly reducing development time for subsequent projects and giving General Mills a major competitive advantage through speed to market and integrated analytics.

General Mills

Dom Alcocer

Marketing Manager