Food and drink is the category where DTC ecommerce is most commercially interesting and most technically demanding in equal measure. The subscription economics are stronger than almost any other product vertical — a customer who reorders their coffee, hot sauce, or fermented foods on a recurring basis generates LTV that one-time purchase brands can't match. The complexity of building that properly is real: subscription architecture, bundle mechanics, delivery window management, and the Klaviyo retention programme that keeps subscribers ordering rather than quietly churning.
Some of Tribe's strongest work comes from this space. The brands below represent the range of what we build — from a founder launching their first DTC store to established food brands with complex fulfilment requirements and subscription programmes that need to work flawlessly at scale. Every one of them is on Shopify Plus.
Food and drink brands Tribe has built and grown
| Brand | Product | What we built | Headline result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bold Bean Co | Specialty beans and pulses | Full retainer — Shopify Plus, Skio Pick & Mix bundle, Klaviyo lifecycle, paid media | +41% gross sales YoY, +57% orders YoY, 35% of store revenue through bundle |
| Sauce Shop | Hot sauces and condiments | Full Shopify Plus rebuild, native bundle builder, Skio subscription from scratch | +52% CVR uplift, +41% gross sales in first 4 months, bundle AOV 82% above store average |
| Citizens of Soil | Award-winning olive oil | Design, development, CRO, paid media, subscription growth — two-year retainer | +790% YoY subscription revenue |
| Momo Kombucha | Organic kombucha | Full Shopify Plus rebuild — flavour-led PDPs, split product architecture, integrated reviews | CVR uplift, AOV growth, and stronger mobile funnel performance in the first seven weeks post-launch |
| Origin Coffee | Specialty coffee | CRO audit, Shopify Plus upgrade, subscription optimisation, Klaviyo | +96% YoY subscription revenue |
| Freja | Bone broth collagen products | Shopify Plus build (v1 and v2), Recharge subscriptions and bundle, multilingual | All key metrics improved within one week of launch |
| Mother Root | Non-alcoholic aperitif | Shopify Plus build, GSAP animations, Buy More Save More mechanics, recipe hubs | Premium DTC store built for conversion and organic discoverability |
| Stocked | Chef-cooked frozen meals | Shopify Plus, Skio dynamic box, Binaery delivery date picker, Klaviyo | 0.92% monthly cancellation rate, +60% subscriber LTV vs non-bundle customers |
| Fermary | Raw kimchi and krauts | Full DTC stack from scratch — brand, Shopify Plus, Skio bundle, Klaviyo, paid media | 81% of consumer revenue through Build-a-Bundle in week one, +110% revenue Q-on-Q |
The range of what we build
The brands above span a wide range of complexity. Fermary is a recent example of a build from the ground up — Tribe created the brand identity, Shopify Plus store, Skio subscription programme, and Klaviyo lifecycle before the first order was placed. Citizens of Soil is a two-year retainer engagement that has reshaped a brand from a standing start into an award-winning olive oil club, with +790% subscription revenue growth reflecting what sustained, joined-up work across CRO, design, paid media, and retention actually produces.
Stocked sits at the far end of the complexity spectrum. A subscription meal delivery brand with a build-a-bundle mechanic as the entire purchase experience, a delivery date selector integrated at the point of bundle build, and a category constraints system that enforces fulfilment rules without the customer ever hitting an error. There is no standard Shopify app that handles all of that. The architecture spans Shopify Plus, Skio's dynamic box, Binaery for delivery scheduling, and a custom subscriber portal — all connected, all working together. The result is a 0.92% monthly cancellation rate in a category where the industry average is five to eight times higher.
Most food and drink brands sit between those two points. A clear proposition, a product that lends itself to subscription or gifting, and a Shopify store that needs to convert well, retain the customers it acquires, and handle subscription mechanics without operational friction. The specifics — which subscription platform, whether a bundle builder is warranted, what the Klaviyo programme looks like — depend on the product and the commercial model, not on a templated agency approach.
What food and drink DTC specifically requires
Beyond the standard Shopify build requirements, food and drink DTC has a set of considerations that other categories don't. Subscription is almost universally relevant — the replenishment mechanic is intrinsic to food and drink in a way it isn't to homeware or fashion. This means the subscription platform choice and architecture decisions carry more weight: a poorly integrated Recharge or Skio setup creates friction at every billing cycle, and that friction drives cancellations that a better-built experience would have prevented.
Bundle mechanics are disproportionately valuable in food and drink because the category lends itself to curation. A hot sauce brand where customers build their own selection of six bottles from a range of thirty creates a higher AOV, a stronger brand interaction, and a subscriber with more personal investment in their recurring order than one who was auto-enrolled on a fixed product. The build-a-bundle mechanics developed across Bold Bean, Sauce Shop, Stocked, and Fermary are grounded in what actually works in the category.
Klaviyo is the retention layer that makes the economics work. A food and drink brand with a properly built email lifecycle programme — post-purchase flows tied to what the customer bought, replenishment triggers timed to real product usage cycles, subscriber-specific campaigns that treat recurring customers as a different audience to one-time buyers — generates materially more revenue per customer than one running broadcast campaigns to an undifferentiated list. Origin's +96% and Citizens of Soil's +790% subscription revenue figures both reflect what happens when retention infrastructure is built properly alongside the site.
Scaling brands, not just building for established ones
There is a version of agency food and drink work that consists of building stores for brands that are already famous and would grow regardless. Tribe's track record in this category is different. Bold Bean, Sauce Shop, Momo, Fermary — these are brands Tribe has grown alongside, not just built for at peak. The +57% order growth at Bold Bean and the +110% quarterly revenue growth at Fermary reflect what happens when the commercial infrastructure is built right from the beginning rather than retrofitted once the brand has already scaled.
That said, the work includes established brands too. Origin Coffee and Freja are brands with existing presence and loyal customer bases — where the engagement is about rebuilding the commercial architecture to unlock the next phase of growth, not starting from scratch. The range matters because food and drink DTC brands at every stage of maturity have genuinely different needs, and the right answer for each is different.
If you're a food or drink brand looking to build or improve your DTC setup, get in touch. The conversation usually starts with where you are now and where the commercial model needs to get to — and works backwards from there to what needs to be built. Tribe is a DTC ecommerce agency specialising in food, drink and CPG brands on Shopify Plus.