Error asking to call IPageDataContextInitializer.Initialize method only on cloud host

I'm having a problem where my site runs perfectly locally but when I deploy it to Azure I get the following error on the homepage:

InvalidOperationException: Missing page context data. If required use IPageDataContextInitializer.Initialize method to initialize the context manually. For POST actions use HtmlHelper extension method Html.Kentico().PageData() to persist the page context.

I am using content tree based routing which works fine locally and from what I understand content tree routing doesn't require manual initialization for context. I've even set Azure as a dev environment in the config so it matches the same startup routine as my localhost. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.