A real sweet website

for Shuman Farms

For over 30 years, the family-owned Shuman Farms has been growing sweet onions in the Vidalia growing region of Georgia. Primarily branded under the RealSweet name but also including Mr. Buck’s, Shuman Farms delivers the very specific Vidalia onion variety as well as a handful of other onion types, onion-centric recipes, and cooking videos and resources. Shuman Farms also participates in nationwide charities, including their own charity, Produce for Kids, which is a marketing organization campaigning for healthier food for hungry families across the US.

Services

Development Platforms

The Website Design

Shuman Farms’ primary brand, RealSweet, held the bulk of the company’s recipes, videos, and product information. Because of that, RealSweet was the website design and development starting point for the Shuman Farms family and, since we used the Umbraco CMS, it was easy enough to scale everything down in the sites that followed. The Real Sweet website itself was built to scale up in some respects, as we made it easy to add more recipes, resources, and general content that would be useful to RealSweet customers.

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Recipes

For produce websites, the recipes section can not only provide visitors with ideas for the best ways to serve the product, but also establish a lot of relevant, useful content that can help with SEO. If the company has as big a collection of recipes as RealSweet does, though, a challenge can be making sure it's all organized in a way that's easily navigable and visually interesting. We allowed for the recipes on the site to be organized by type—including by meal, event, and dietary restriction—while also implementing a search functionality that could pull up a recipe by keyword. Add in some delicious looking recipe images, all the necessary ingredient information and easy-to-follow cooking instructions, and an option for a printable version, and you've got a very user-friendly and stylish recipes section for these sweet onions.

Shuman Farms Corporate Site

Based largely off the design and development of the RealSweet website, the corporate site for Shuman Farms is a simple display of the company’s brands, history, and media assets. Unique color and font elements in the website design kept this from being a smaller clone of the RealSweet site, and allowed the Shuman Farms branding to come through.

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RealSweet Rubies

RealSweet Rubies are a red variety of onion with a small seasonal window but big flavor. We built them a little site with just the basics: links to recipes hosted on the main RealSweet website, a link to the Shuman Farms corporate site, and a contact form for any questions or inquiries visitors might have. Although we added a little something special with animations and illustrations, for the most part we kept the RealSweet Rubies site fittingly sweet and simple.

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Mr. Bucks

Named after Buck Shuman, the Shuman Farms patriarch and an onion farmer of some renown in his own right, Mr. Buck’s is a smaller Vidalia onion brand under the Shuman Farms umbrella. We built a simple, to-the-point single-page website that tells the story of Mr. Buck (the person, not the onions) and promotes the brand as a tribute to John Shuman’s father.

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Rayonier Inc.

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