From 2.5 Months to 1 Day - How Spinneys Achieved 96% Faster SKU Time-to-market

Spinneys is one of the GCC’s leading premium grocery retailers, known for the quality of products, as well as high standards in customer service, freshness and food safety. Customers look to Spinneys for an elevated shopping experience, and online shoppers expect the same thing in the form of clear product descriptions, accurate nutrition data, and details they can trust.

As the retailer’s catalog grew, keeping up with content creation using a manual, outsourced agency became more difficult. English and Arabic copy had long turnaround times, important product details were missed, and teams struggled to meet the pace of customer demand.  

Spinneys needed a faster, more reliable way to create consistent product content at scale without sacrificing quality.

Overview

• Company: Spinneys
• Headquarters: Dubai, UAE
• Year of Founding: 1961
• Business Model: Retail & E-commerce
• Key Offering: Premium Grocery, Home Goods, Pet Care, Cosmetics & Beauty
• Online Platform: https://www.spinneys.com

The Challenge

As a premium grocery retailer, Spinneys knew that high-quality product content like nutrition, ingredients, allergens, and dietary flags directly impacted online trust and customer decisions. However, the existing process to bring products online weren’t able to keep up with catalog growth. To keep consistent with their long-standing brand & reputation, the Spinneys team knew it was time for a change.

Challenges:

• Incomplete and inconsistent FMCG content from suppliers, lacking details like:  
  
  • Ingredients
  • Nutritional values
  • Allergen information
  • Lifestyle and dietary flags (Halal, keto, vegan, dairy-free, nut-free, etc.)

• Major bottlenecks in English and Arabic content creation with months-long turnarounds:
  
  • English copywriting for 300 SKUs took up to 1 month  
  • Arabic translations required an additional 1.5 months for the same set
  • Total time: 2.5 months for 300 SKUs

• SKU volume created a heavy reliance on manual, outsourced teams, creating:
  
  • High operational costs
  • Slow, inconsistent workflows
  • Delays in bringing products online
  • Siloed teams with no collaboration

• Images needed standardizing before go-live, adding another layer of manual work.

Altogether, the process for creating and checking content and images could not support category expansion and rapid assortment growth.

The Solution

Spinneys sought to future-proof its product data operations by adopting a proactive approach to manage content and images. Instead of adding additional headcount to meet their needs, the team focused on building a technology-first, scalable process to move faster, without sacrificing quality or trust. Trustana supported this plan by providing an automated solution to build and maintain a strong and flexible product data foundation.

• Automated, structured data enrichment: Key product attributes generated at scale, including not only customer-facing content but also metadata to support SEO, site search filters, and on-site discovery. ‍
• Dual content generation in English and Arabic: Both languages now created in a single workflow, cutting content turnaround times from months to just a few hours. ‍
• Image enrichment at scale: Product images are standardized and improved in bulk, creating clean, high-quality visuals that support search, merchandising, and browsing. ‍
• A repeatable, scalable workflow: With a unified, in-house process supported by Trustana, Spinneys can import raw data, enrich attributes, generate bilingual content, refine images, and export production-ready listings without relying on manual teams.

Spinneys’ transformation has resulted in a strategic capability to scale its online catalog with confidence, launch products faster, and deliver a clear, consistent product experience that supports discovery, navigation, and long-term digital growth.

The Results

• >95% faster time to market - Work that took 2.5 months, now takes 1 day ‍
• Automated catalog enrichment - Large-scale automation for product data and image workflows ‍
• EN + AR in one workflow - A single, efficient process for multilingual content creation ‍
• Reduced Overhead Costs - Less manual work, fewer vendors, and smoother operations

“Trustana transformed how we create and maintain product content across English and Arabic, combining speed with exceptional accuracy. Our team can now scale confidently, knowing our product data is complete, consistent, and optimized for customer discovery.” - Chandana Ramasamy, Product and Campaign Manager, Spinneys