Matsmart (also known as Motatos in some markets) is a Swedish e-commerce company on a mission to reduce food waste by selling surplus and overstocked products online at a discount. Operating across Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Denmark, the company relies heavily on product images to showcase its quality and value, garnering millions of daily impressions.
As Matsmart’s online presence grew, its Drupal Commerce–based image setup started to limit performance. Fixed-size images, outdated formats, and manual updates slowed pages and created inconsistent experiences across markets.
By moving to ImageKit, Matsmart unified image delivery across all regions, cutting image payloads by over 50%, improving page load times by 40%, and ensuring fast, consistent performance everywhere.
“ImageKit’s delivery just works. The flexibility to transform images in real-time via URL-based parameters and serve modern formats (AVIF and WebP) automatically has been a game-changer for us.”
—Alessio Maffeis, Director of Engineering, Matsmart-Motatos
Key results at a glance
Unified media delivery
Stores in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Denmark now deliver images from the same ImageKit service.
50%+ reduction in image size
Automatic conversion from JPEG/PNG to modern formats like WebP and AVIF, reducing payload sizes without compromising quality.
30–40% faster page loads
Significant improvement in page rendering and Core Web Vitals across all devices.
The challenge: Static workflows and inconsistent performance
Product images are central to Matsmart’s customer experience. Each image helps communicate the freshness of the food items, their quality, and value. But as the catalog grew, the existing system became a bottleneck.
Rigid image presets
Drupal Commerce generated a few fixed-size image presets at upload time. Adding new variants required reprocessing thousands of assets, slowing new website rollouts and experimentation.
Limited formats and large payloads
With only JPEG and PNG supported, file sizes were heavy and page loads slow, especially on slow mobile connections.
Fragmented performance across regions
Because of the architecture each regional storefront handled images independently, with no unified optimization or caching layer. Performance varied, bandwidth use was inefficient, and costs became harder to predict.
Why Matsmart chose ImageKit and how it helped
When Matsmart began evaluating optimization platforms in early 2022, the team wanted a solution that could modernize their legacy setup, automate image delivery, and scale reliably across five European markets.
Matsmart now stores all its assets in an internal Content and Order Management system in Azure Blob Storage. ImageKit offers native integration with private Azure Blob Storage containers, making it easy to start optimizing images stored there.
Some of the ImageKit features that helped in achieving MatSmart's goals were -
Automatic conversion to modern formats
ImageKit automatically detects the supported formats on each device and intelligently converts images to WebP or AVIF. Matsmart first implemented automatic WebP optimization, reducing image sizes by 40%, and then moved to automatic AVIF optimization, further reducing them by another 20%.
Named Transformations
ImageKit allows users to create aliases for commonly used transformations, making development easier and enhancing security. Drupal's static image sizes were converted into ImageKit's named transformations, ensuring backward compatibility, while providing room for future experimentation with real-time transformations.
Real-time transformations
Matsmart can now transform its images stored in Azure Blob Storage containers in real time, helping them adapt their imagery to newer devices and layouts with simple code changes, rather than batch reprocessing.
Integrated CDN for fast delivery across countries
ImageKit comes with AWS CloudFront built in, ensuring fast delivery in all the countries where Matsmart operates.
Matsmart then uses these CDN-powered URLs with its Next.js frontend to get automatic optimization and real-time transformations across all devices.
Results: Measurable impact within days
The move to ImageKit delivered immediate and measurable improvements across Matsmart’s image infrastructure.
Over 50% reduction in image payloads
Switching to modern image formats (AVIF and WebP) significantly reduced file sizes while maintaining quality and consistency.
30–40% faster visually complete times
Improved compression and CDN delivery boosted rendering speed and Core Web Vitals across devices.
Unified, scalable image delivery
A single pipeline now serves all five storefronts, providing consistent performance and eliminating the need for manual maintenance.
Simplified developer workflow
Automatic resizing and caching eliminated the need for manual QA and reprocessing, freeing developers to focus on new features.
Predictable, usage-based costs
Costs now scale directly with traffic, removing overages and aligning spend with real usage.
Next steps with ImageKit
Matsmart plans to extend its use of ImageKit beyond image delivery to further automate and enhance its visual workflows. The next phase involves leveraging ImageKit’s AI-powered background removal and other transformations to standardize product images across marketing and email channels.
Conclusion
Matsmart’s migration to ImageKit transformed its legacy image setup into a fast, scalable, and automated optimization pipeline. The brand now enjoys lighter pages, faster digital storefronts, and predictable performance across all regions.
With ImageKit, Matsmart ensures every product image is showcased in high quality with quick load and high reliability, helping the company continue its mission to make saving food (and bandwidth) a better experience for everyone.
