50 years of brand history - accessed in minutes, not days
From days of manual searching to minutes: how Iceland Foods transformed compliance, discovery & everyday access across its corporate archive with AI-powered Active Digital Preservation
A household name embedded in British food culture
Iceland Foods has been part of British food culture for over 50 years - and its corporate archive tells that story. But a five-decade archive is only as useful as it is searchable. With large, partially cataloged collections, including nearly 200 staff magazines, and no way to search across them, answering internal enquiries, GDPR requests and litigation queries took days of manual work, with no audit trail to back up the results. With Preservica's AI-powered Active Digital Preservation, that changed. Searches that once took days now take minutes, delivering comprehensive, auditable and defensible results.
Faster searches, stronger compliance, greater control
Decades of records, searchable in seconds
With Preservica AI Editions, Iceland can search nearly 200 issues of its staff magazine archive in seconds, turning a two-day manual process into a single search term.
Compliance confidence, built in
From GDPR subject access requests to litigation queries, Iceland can now deliver thorough, auditable search results with a defensible process — replacing manual effort and uncertainty.
One platform for a growing corporate archive
Holdings previously scattered across departments and a third-party production company are now unified in a single, actively managed preservation environment, ready to scale as the collection grows.
Challenges
Decades of records with no way to find them
Iceland’s corporate archive spans over five decades and thousands of records — but scale without searchability creates its own problems. With digital content spread across multiple locations and no formal Digital Preservation strategy in place, the organization faced growing operational and compliance exposure. The practical consequences ran across every aspect of how the archive could be managed and used:
- Discoverability: Â Searches across the ~200-issue staff magazine archive could take one to two days of manual work with no guarantee of thoroughness
- Collections management:Â Without a collections management system, even partially cataloged physical material could not be searched reliably
- Scattered collections:Â Digital content was spread across internal departments and a third-party production company, with no dedicated preservation home
- Compliance exposure:Â The absence of a Digital Preservation strategy left the archive poorly positioned to support GDPR subject access requests and litigation queries with confidence
- Growing digital holdings:Â Hundreds of gigabytes of newly digitized video content had no secure, long-term home
Results
From days of manual searching to minutes
With Preservica Enterprise Edition in place, Iceland established:
- AI-powered OCR (Preservica AI Editions): turning a task that had required manually scrolling through 200 individual PDFs into a single search term 50+ years of corporate history, now transformed by embedded AI—turning days of manual searching into a single search
- Active Digital Preservation:Â ensuring the long-term integrity and usability of the collection, not simply storage
- Flexible metadata management: supporting both common archival standards and custom schemas, enabling Iceland to structure and describe its collections in a way that reflects how the business actually works
- Scalability: Â an enterprise-grade platform built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection without compromising performance or control
- Granular access controls: allowing the archive to be extended to specific internal stakeholders across various departments, on the organization’s own terms
Outcomes
An archive that serves the business
Iceland has moved from an archive that was difficult to access and harder to search, to one that actively serves the organization - supporting research, compliance and operational needs across the business.
✔️ Search in minutes, not days reducing archive search time from one to two days of manual work to a matter of minutes with AI-powered OCR
✔️ Support compliance searches answering GDPR subject access requests and litigation queries with a thorough, auditable search process
✔️ Unify collections under one platform consolidating holdings previously spread across departments and a third-party production company into a single, actively managed home
✔️ Extend access across the business opening the archive to key stakeholders across various departments on the organisation’s own terms
✔️ Accelerate digitization using a trusted preservation destination to drive the digitization of analog holdings stored on obsolete media formats
Looking ahead - From inaccessible to instant
For Lorna Lowry, Executive Assistant to Iceland Foods' CEO, the shift has been immediate and personal: "Before Preservica, our company archive was largely inaccessible, with no digital access or clear visibility of what we actually held. It simply wasn’t fit for purpose, especially in a fast-paced executive environment. Now, everything is at our fingertips. I can instantly find what I need, or rely on James to retrieve it quickly and confidently when it matters most."
That's what modern archive infrastructure delivers in a fast-moving executive environment: not just storage, but certainty.
Building on AI as the archive grows
The results to date are just the beginning. With Preservica's integrated AI capabilities, Iceland has a roadmap that extends AI-powered search and discovery across the full archive - from automated transcription of thousands of training videos and TV adverts, to PII detection ahead of future GDPR requests, to self-service search for staff across the Iceland intranet.
The infrastructure is in place. The archive is only going to grow.
See what an AI-ready archive could do for your organization - request a free trial today
