Recipes into results: How Unilever Food Solutions Indonesia cooked up 71% organic growth through a chef-led content strategy

It is not a rare occurrence that the Indonesian food and beverages sector is growing rapidly, with +7.5% year-over-year growth. Relatively, the industry has also grown to rely more on digital search for recipes, food trends, and even operational hacks.

Hence, this became a double-edged sword: as the landscape grew, so did the competition. This became critical for Unilever Food Solutions Indonesia, whose focus lies in elevating recipe content from general inspiration to strategic tools, tailored for full-service restaurants and culinary operators. What UFS ID wanted was clear: to lead Indonesia as the most result-driven content for chefs and culinary operators, particularly independent and chain Full-Service Restaurants (FSR). 

The good thing is, 80% of all UFS ID site sessions came from articles and recipes. However, only a handful were optimised. 

This case study discusses how UFS ID navigated the use of a chef-centric editorial approach in bridging content gaps that hindered not just their visibility but overall productivity.

The Challenge: Driving culinary conversations

Amidst having strong product brand presence through Knorr, Royco, and Bayco, UFS ID admittedly had one challenge: visibility. While the company ranked on Google’s first page, this was limited to only three out of hundreds mapped keywords related to the local Indonesian dishes. This totaled to less than 1% search visibility, further hindering the company’s ability to become a trusted resource in the culinary industry.

This posed a challenge that required innovative content marketing that moves beyond gaining online traffic, rather, driving culinary conversations.

Execution: From strategy to authenticity

In order to achieve this goal, UFS ID outlined its main objectives: to grow organic session by +20% YoY, increase its share of voice for high-intent dish and operational keywords, launch a dynamic content framework centering on local Indonesia dishes backed by sharp segmentation for QSR and FSR audiences; and finally, to elevate UFS ID from a product brand to a trusted editorial brand.

In doing so, UFS ID mapped out key steps and strategies to achieve its goal to be more discoverable, findable, and indispensable for operators:

1. Keyword-driven Editorial Planning: UFS ID since January of 2024 mapped over 800 dish-based keywords using SEO tools (SEMRush, Google Trends, and UFS brand queries). This was done by categorising data by locality and relevance, commercial intent, seasonal alignment, and product match potential.
2. Content Optimisation and Segmentation: To improve discoverability and engagement, UFS ID, for the first time, split its operator segments into two: 

• Quick-Service Restaurants
• Full-service Restaurants

While QSR prioritised scale, preparation speed, and cost efficiency, FSRs, on the other hand, focused on flavor complexity, kitchen techniques, and story-driven platings.

3. Seasonal and Cultural Content Integration: UFS ID underscored commercial calendars to build relevance, e.g., Ramadan & menu sharing season, product launches to create benefit-led landing pages and editorial articles, and enhancing cultural moments by tapping into local dishes.
4. Attract-Engage-Convert: This model became UFS ID’s content funnel for culinary decision-making, tracking performance metrics of content that ranged from trending dishes for attraction, culinary guides, and product embeds for conversion. 

• Attract: while its content revolved around trending dishes, local and seasonal recipes, its role was to pull and rank the site via SEO.
• Engage: This was meant to build brand utility by centering on content about operator hacks, dish costings, and culinary guides.
• Convert: In order to drive commercial action, this content relied on CTAs, product embeds, and downloadable recipes.

Each of the Attract-Engage-Content pieces was tracked for its page rankings, scroll depths, CTRs, and clicks to e-comm or CRM linkouts. 

5. Amplifying Culinary Voice: While UFS ID’s main goal was to upscale its visibility, their goal, at this point, no longer circled around toppling rankings, but rather being the first thing chefs trust.

UFS ID’s goal was certain at the start of the strategy: to bolster their visibility and discoverability. However, this realisation also brought upon the knowledge that to do so, the game shouldn’t revolve around just building up search engine optimisation, but building a working kitchen that is chef-centric and seasonal.

The Execution Process: Embedding visibility, optimising relativity

With goals and strategies aligned, UFS ID’s execution was mapped out by building a structured content strategy that is rooted not just in brand talking points, but also exemplifies real culinary behavior: thinking like a chef.

“This wasn’t a volume-driven content push. It was a strategic, chef-centered publishing model that made UFS ID more findable and more useful—delivering lasting visibility and real value to Indonesian culinary operators,” the company commented.

Then and there, UFS ID’s brand equity no longer just exists to drive performance, but to build equity through consistent utility and cultural relevance:

1. Making cravings work: UFS made it simple – what people crave, operators cook. This allowed the company’s content to be aligned with what people were actually searching for.
2. The Right Ramadan Approach: For UFS ID, Ramadan is not just a season; it is a business inflection point. Through their editorial stack, inclusion of the highly-demanded topics and menus was optimised, making it their strongest-performing campaign period.  
3. Embedding a launch: Instead of broadcasting a new product, UFS ID positioned their launch by immediately making it searchable: a landing page and SEO-optimised articles were utilised. Through this, the product was present, searchable, and visible—rather than broadcast.

The Result: Chef-led approach is the recipe for success

Significantly, UFS ID achieved measurable results, illustrating overall success in numbers: “Our goal was to show that content— done strategically, written clearly, and published consistently—can outperform louder, costlier, or trend-chasing digital efforts.”

• Content Delivery & Output: In 2024, UFS ID was able to publish 80 new articles that heavily delved into seasonally relevant dishes. This was partnered with 112 content optimisations to refresh underperforming content. As a result:
• Organic Traffic Growth: UFS ID exceeded its KPI with impressive organic growth in 2024, representing a 71% year-over-year increase solely through SEO content without media amplification. More than 76% of these sessions came from article pages, indicating high engagement with informative editorial content grounded in local Indonesian dishes. Its engagement rate also topped up to 89.1% for an engagement rate, proving that content wasn’t solely found but ‘read, valued, and acted upon’.
• Enhanced Keyword Visibility: The brand outperformed competitors in share of voice for targeted culinary queries, attaining 8.01% visibility by Q4 2024, primarily driven by chef-focused content aligned with operator search behavior.
• Prioritising Culinary Practicality: Throughout UFS ID’s campaign, certain formats also helped in aiding their operations, such as including Ramadan articles that combined operational insights, or product-related recipes that introduced stock keeping unit (SKU) use using real preparation techniques.

In summation, powering content through editorial pieces that prioritised UFS ID’s culinary practicality was what championed their success—beyond metrics, rankings, and numbers.