Not a lot of people are currently interested in buying pasta online. Shipping costs and logistics make no sense when a box is 99 cents at the grocery store. With pasta so easily accessible, are there any e-commerce markets that would make sense?
Mill Valley Pasta is one company that thinks there is. They make specialty pasta that sells for 10 to 15 dollars a box, and list them on a website alongside sauces, seasonings, and condiments. Most of their sales are wholesale, and the boxes are sold out of shops at even steeper upcharges. It’s a similar model to Royal Riviera Pears, or other gourmet foods, but I don’t think it’s the value proposition that makes the most sense for Mill Valley.
The pasta company has products such as fettuccine and cavatelli, which are usually available on supermarket shelves from store brands, but they also make pastas such as trecce, scarabocchio, and fusilloni. They own one of two die in the world that can make fusilloni pasta (fusilli or corkscrew noodles, but twice as big with ridges and texture), and the other is an exclusive restaurant that doesn’t sell the pasta boxed: only in dishes for customers.
Gourmet pasta has potential in e-commerce that grocery store noodles probably never will. With a bit of a marketing effort from Mill Valley, their website could be optimized to sell their unique products. From an SEO and marketing perspective, fusilloni should be the star of the site if it quite literally isn’t available anywhere else. However, it’s currently hidden between orzo and a Mac and Cheese Dinner Kit on the online storefront.
At the moment Mill Valley’s website is structured so that their most loyal fanbase can easily find what they’re looking for. With a bit of development (and advertising), it could be optimized to drive search traffic to the correct products. “Trecce pasta” search on Google returns Mill Valley’s product as one of the first results, but “braided pasta” doesn’t turn up their website at all because it’s not in their trecce’s product description.
Mill Valley is a great example of a company with products that fit a niche market well and could utilize SEO to take it over.
3 Responses
I think this is a great example of how having truly unique products opens up the world of E-commerce and the opportunity to sell there. I would never think of trying to sell pasta online, but with a product as quality and exclusive as Mill Valley it makes sense. It is cool to see a company take advantage of a whole new way of selling that you typically wouldn’t consider. It goes to show that sometimes innovative thinking is as simple as trying out a new location to sell your products.
This post showcases an example of a company that could benefit greatly from using SEO on their website. They have very specific products that they sell in the unique noodles that can’t be bought anywhere else. Using keywords to drive people to their site to find the specific noodles could bring in lots of profit for the company. The company should consider SEO as a way to attract more people to their site.
This was a very interesting read. Not much thought goes into the pasta that I buy at the grocery store, so creating a site specifically designed to sell luxury pasta is an idea I can’t say I would have ever thought of. It should be very easy to pin down the SEO market for said luxury pastas since I can’t imagine there is many other site offering that kind of product. This was a very interesting post with lots of good information