Food sells in cold chain.

A food and beverage ecommerce agency builds and runs the operating stack for a specialty food, beverage, coffee, or CPG brand selling direct to consumer. That means Shopify or Shopify Plus storefront engineering, perishable catalog architecture with ship-by-date logic, cold-chain carrier integration and multi-warehouse allocation, subscription kit builder UX, FDA FSMA and FSVP compliance workflows, Klaviyo and Attentive retention flows tuned to consumption windows, and downstream syndication to Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Thrive Market, and regional distributors.

Our five-layer operating model for DTC food and beverage brands. Shelf-life layer so no box ships past its honest consumable window. Cold-chain routing layer for temperature-class-aware carrier selection. Subscription kit layer with consumption-matched cadence. Compliance layer for FSMA, FSVP, allergen, and nutrition-panel data. Channel layer for DTC source-of-truth with Amazon, retail, and distributor feeds downstream. Five layers, bottom-up, because skipping a layer puts product integrity at risk.

Pricing is scoped to engagement shape. F&B brand audit: 2 weeks. Cold Chain Method build on Shopify Plus: 10-14 weeks. Subscription kit engagement: 6-8 weeks. Full F&B partnership: 12 months with a dedicated pod. Book a 30-minute call and we send a scoped quote within 48 hours. Scope moves price, not the conversation.

Yes. FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act, and FSVP for foreign supplier verification, require US food brands to maintain preventive controls records, supplier verification files, and traceability artifacts. Our build stores the required data as structured metafields, renders mandatory allergen statements and nutrition panels on PDPs from the same source as retail feeds, and provides the audit-trail endpoints regulatory counsel can query on demand. We are engineers and designers, not FDA attorneys; we build the workflow and your regulatory lead signs off.

Three layers. First, per-SKU temperature class stored on the product; the cart and checkout logic reads it. Second, carrier routing based on destination zip code against published SLA maps; frozen ships 2-day via UPS or FedEx with gel packs, chilled ships next-day, ambient ships ground. Third, ship-by-day-of-week rules so no perishable box leaves the warehouse Thursday for weekend dwell time. We integrate directly with ShipStation, Shippo, or the carrier API depending on volume.

Yes. Subscription kits are the retention engine of F&B. Our kit builder runs on ReCharge, Stay AI, or Smartrr with a custom front-end. Buyers build the kit once, rotate flavors on a cadence matched to consumption, skip before the box ships rather than after, swap products in the next cycle, and pause without cancelling. Churn under 5 percent monthly and skip rate under 22 percent are our targets. Membership tiers layered on top replace the standard subscribe-and-save discount with a real club.

Yes. Most food brands above a certain scale run DTC and retail in parallel. We run product data syndication from Shopify as the source of truth out to Amazon Vendor or Seller catalogs, Whole Foods portal uploads, Thrive Market, Misfits Market, Target, and regional distributors. Channel-specific pricing and pack configuration vary without touching the master catalog. Inventory allocation prevents retail pulls from eating DTC stock during promotion windows.

Three triggers. First, subscription complexity: kit builders, flavor rotation, and tier logic hit standard Shopify limits. Second, multi-warehouse: cold-chain routing across two or more fulfilment locations only runs cleanly at Plus. Third, retail: the B2B wholesale portal for distributor ordering only lives at Plus. We run the fit assessment on the intro call against those three triggers, not against revenue alone.