Food and beverage is one of the harder categories to sell online. Margins are thin, shipping is heavy and often refrigerated, the product is consumed and forgotten, and the customer has a supermarket within walking distance selling something adjacent for less. The brands below have all solved some version of that problem, and none of them solved it with a nice theme.
The prize is worth the difficulty. Statista forecasts the global food ecommerce market to grow by $546.4bn between 2024 and 2029, an increase of roughly 80%. The category is growing faster than most merchants are improving their stores, which is the gap this list is about.
Twelve of the thirteen are on Shopify Plus. One is not, and it has better filtering than most of the Plus stores here. Worth holding on to before anyone tells you the tier is what makes a store good.
Here is the short version, then the detail.
| Store | Tier | The mechanic worth stealing |
|---|---|---|
| Beavertown | Plus | Subscription as a brand asset, not a checkbox. The "Skullscription" has a name, a landing page and a personality. |
| Tony's Chocolonely | Plus | Mission content sits inside the buying journey rather than in a separate About page nobody reads. |
| David Protein | Plus | A single-SKU catalogue that resists the urge to expand. Everything on the page argues one point. |
| Origin Coffee | Standard | Filtering by how the customer brews, not by how the business categorises stock. |
| Momofuku Goods | Plus | Recipes as merchandising. The use case sells the second and third SKU. |
| Death Wish Coffee | Plus | A buying guide that does the sales assistant job at the top of funnel. |
| Chamberlain Coffee | Plus | Audience-first design. The store is built for the customer who already knows the founder. |
| Heatonist | Plus | Faceted search on a 200-plus SKU catalogue, filtered by heat rather than by brand. |
| Pipcorn | Plus | Dietary filtering treated as primary navigation, because for this buyer it is. |
| Huel | Plus | Subscription architecture at scale on Recharge, with nine international storefronts behind it. |
| Graza | Plus | Format as differentiator. Two SKUs, one squeeze bottle, an entire brand built on the difference. |
| Magic Spoon | Plus | Bundle-led PDP. The variety pack is the default, not the upsell. |
| Fly By Jing | Plus | Content and commerce on the same page, not in separate silos. |
The 13 stores
1. Beavertown
Beavertown is the clearest proof in UK drinks that brand and conversion are not in tension. The comic-book artwork that made the cans famous carries straight into the store, and the store still works. Collection pages filter by ABV, format and pack size. The checkout is short.
The mechanic to note is the "Skullscription". It is a beer subscription, which is a commodity, given a name, a dedicated landing page and a voice. It reads like part of the brand rather than a discount lever bolted onto the PDP, and that framing is what makes people sign up. Beavertown also migrated off WordPress onto Shopify, and the agency that rebuilt the store reports an 835% sales increase and an 82% lift in conversion rate over the following twelve months. (8th Dial case study) Agency-reported figures always deserve a raised eyebrow, but the direction of travel is not in doubt.
The open goal: gifting. Beer is bought as a present constantly, and the store does not yet lean into it. Gift messaging, scheduled delivery and a gift-set entry point in the nav would open a Q4 revenue line for a brand this recognisable.
Tier: Shopify Plus
2. Tony's Chocolonely
Most mission-led brands quarantine the mission on an About page and let the store sell chocolate. Tony's does the opposite. The slave-free supply chain argument appears in the navigation, on product pages and inside the packaging story, because for this brand the ethics are the product feature. Somebody buying Tony's over Cadbury is buying the position.
The unequal-chunk bar is the sharpest bit of merchandising in the category. It is a physical product decision that carries a message, and the store lets that decision do the explaining instead of drowning the visitor in copy.
The open goal: consistency across markets. Move between the UK, US and NL storefronts and the content depth, promotions and range diverge. Tightening that is an internationalisation exercise rather than a design one, and it is the kind of thing that compounds quietly across every market.
Tier: Shopify Plus
3. David Protein
One product. Several flavours. That is the entire catalogue, and the store is disciplined enough not to fight it. The homepage leads with the macro claim, backs it with the science, and gets out of the way. There is no lifestyle carousel, no blog tile, no six-part story about the founder.
This is the entry on the list most merchants should study, because the temptation at £5m to £50m is always to add SKUs and add page sections. David does the opposite and converts on clarity. Every element on the PDP argues the same point.
The open goal: the top of the funnel. The store converts the person who already knows what David is, and there is room to build a content layer that catches the person who does not, plus something to bring customers back between purchases.
Tier: Shopify Plus
4. Origin Coffee
The best filtering system on this list, and it is not close. Origin lets you shop by brew method, which means the store is organised around what the customer is about to do rather than how the business categorises inventory. Somebody with an Aeropress does not want to read tasting notes on twelve bags. They want the four that work in an Aeropress.
This is a UK speciality roaster on a standard Shopify plan competing on experience with brands ten times its size. Worth remembering the next time somebody tells you they need Plus to build something good.
The open goal: promoting the subscription harder. For a roaster it is the whole business model, and it currently sits quietly in the nav rather than fighting for attention on the homepage and inside every PDP. That is one of the more straightforward conversion rate optimisation gains available here.
Tier: Shopify (standard)
5. Momofuku Goods
Momofuku sells chilli crunch and noodles, which is to say it sells ingredients. Nobody buys an ingredient. They buy a dinner. The store understands this, and puts recipes next to the products rather than in a content hub three clicks away.
The commercial effect is that the recipe becomes the merchandising. A dish needing chilli crunch, soy and noodles sells three SKUs in one basket without ever running a bundle promotion. For any brand selling components rather than finished meals, this is the model.
The open goal: letting the recipe finish the job. There is no add-all-ingredients-to-basket, so the customer reads the recipe and then goes hunting for each item. Closing that loop would put a conversion step directly on top of the store's best idea.
Tier: Shopify Plus
6. Death Wish Coffee
The "world's strongest coffee" positioning gives Death Wish a problem most brands would love: everybody arrives already knowing the promise. The store's job is to convert curiosity into a first order and then hold on.
It does the second part well. Subscription sits beside every one-time purchase option at the point of decision rather than being chased later by email, and the buying guides answer the questions a shop assistant would answer. That is top-of-funnel content that earns its place.
The open goal: holding the line on focus. The range has expanded into mugs, apparel and gear, and the brand's strongest asset is a single, extremely clear proposition. Keeping merchandise in a supporting role protects it.
Tier: Shopify Plus
7. Chamberlain Coffee
Chamberlain Coffee is built for an audience that arrived before the product did. The store assumes you know Emma Chamberlain, and designs accordingly: heavy on lifestyle imagery, light on coffee education, fast on mobile because the traffic is almost entirely coming from a phone.
That is a legitimate strategic choice, not laziness. Selling to a pre-warmed audience means you can skip the convincing and go straight to the merchandising. Most brands do not have that luxury and should not copy the approach, but it is instructive to see what a store looks like when awareness is a solved problem.
The open goal: building substance underneath the founder. Audience relationships cool, and the store would be more durable with the kind of product-led credibility Origin has. That is a build to make while the attention is still there rather than after.
Tier: Shopify Plus
8. Heatonist
Heatonist is a hot sauce retailer with a catalogue in the hundreds, which is a search and discovery problem before it is anything else. The store solves it by filtering on the attribute the customer actually cares about, which is heat, followed by flavour profile. Nobody browsing hot sauce is browsing by brand.
The heat rating on every PDP is the detail worth stealing. It is a single number that removes the biggest purchase anxiety in the category. If you sell anything where the buyer is nervous about getting it wrong, find your equivalent of the heat rating. Faceted search is one of the highest-return investments a large-catalogue store can make, and Heatonist is the proof. Our Shopify Plus work with large-catalogue merchants almost always starts here.
The open goal: merchandising beyond the collaborations. Hot Ones does enormous work at the top of the funnel, and there is upside in building discovery journeys that stand on their own alongside it.
Tier: Shopify Plus
9. Pipcorn
Pipcorn treats dietary filtering as primary navigation rather than as a secondary facet, which is the right call for a snack brand whose customers are frequently shopping under a constraint. Gluten-free is not a nice-to-have filter for that shopper. It is the first question.
Beyond that the store is a competent, colourful, well-merchandised snack site. Bundles and subscription lift average order value on a product with a low unit price, which is the correct answer to the economics of selling popcorn online.
The open goal: a point of difference. The execution is competent throughout, and the next gain comes from finding the thing that makes this store memorable rather than merely well built.
Tier: Shopify Plus
10. Huel
Huel is the most commercially serious operation here. Nine international storefronts, subscription running on Recharge since the early days on Shopify Plus, and a business that passed £40m within three years and later topped £140m. (Swanky, who built the subscription)
The lesson is not the design. It is the subscription architecture. Huel makes it easy to pause, skip, swap flavours and change frequency, and it does so because the alternative to a pause is a cancellation. Most merchants build a subscription flow that is optimised for signup and hostile to modification, then wonder why churn is high. Huel built for the second month, not the first.
The product also does the retention work for them. It is consumed daily, which creates a habit loop that no email flow can manufacture. If your product is bought quarterly, do not expect Huel's retention numbers by copying Huel's portal.
The open goal: the first-time visitor. Between the quiz, the nutrition tables, the comparison content and the range, there is a lot to process. The store is superbly optimised for the returning subscriber, and there is room to do the same for the person who arrived from an ad thirty seconds ago.
Tier: Shopify Plus
11. Graza
Two products, Sizzle and Drizzle, one for cooking and one for finishing. That is the whole proposition and it is close to perfect, because it turns an undifferentiated commodity into a decision the customer can actually make. Olive oil is olive oil until somebody tells you there are two kinds and you need both.
The squeeze bottle does the rest. It is a format change, not a product change, and it gave the brand a reason to exist that no amount of storytelling could have manufactured. The store then does the obvious thing and sells the pair as a bundle. Third-party estimates put the store somewhere around $860k a month, though treat any external revenue estimate with caution.
The open goal: page weight. The illustration-heavy design is a genuine asset and it carries a cost on a mid-range Android over 4G. Trimming that without losing the charm is a conversion gain, because speed is a revenue metric before it is a Core Web Vitals score.
Tier: Shopify Plus
12. Magic Spoon
Magic Spoon sells cereal at roughly ten times the price of cereal, which means the store has one job: justify the premium before the visitor bounces. It does that with nutrition panels placed high on the page and a value proposition that lands in the first screen.
The bundle mechanic is the part to copy. The variety pack is the default purchase rather than an upsell offered at the cart. That single decision raises average order value on every transaction without asking the customer to do anything, and it also solves the flavour-risk problem for a first-time buyer who does not yet know which one they like.
The open goal: brand, now that conversion is solved. Years of iterating on the same playbook have produced a store where every element works, and the next lever is the one that makes it memorable rather than merely effective.
Tier: Shopify Plus
13. Fly By Jing
Fly By Jing runs the same play as Momofuku and executes it with more editorial confidence. Recipes, sourcing stories and usage ideas sit inside the shopping experience, so the customer discovers what to do with a chilli crisp at the moment they are deciding whether to buy it.
The premium positioning is held throughout, which matters when you are asking somebody to pay several times supermarket price for a condiment. Nothing on the site apologises for the price, and nothing discounts its way out of the argument.
The open goal: the same one as Momofuku. Connecting a recipe directly to a basket is revenue neither brand has taken yet, and the fact that two of the best content merchandisers in the category have both left it there tells you how large the opportunity is.
Tier: Shopify Plus
Building or rebuilding a food and drink store on Shopify? Talk to our team.
What the best food and drink stores have in common
Read those thirteen back to back and the pattern is not visual. The stores look nothing like each other. What they share is a small set of commercial decisions.
They organise around the customer's question, not the product taxonomy
Origin filters by brew method. Heatonist filters by heat. Pipcorn filters by diet. In each case the store has thrown away the way the business thinks about its inventory and rebuilt navigation around the thing the buyer is actually trying to work out. That is a merchandising decision that most brands never make because it means arguing with the ops team.
They design the subscription for month two
Huel lets you pause, skip and swap without speaking to anyone. Beavertown gave its subscription a name and a personality. Both understood that the difficult part of a subscription is not the signup, it is the moment three months in when the customer has too much product in the cupboard and starts looking for the cancel button. Give them a pause button first and you keep the revenue.
They use content to sell the second SKU
Momofuku and Fly By Jing both put recipes next to products, and both do it for a commercial reason rather than an SEO one. A recipe is a basket. It also solves the harder problem for any brand selling ingredients, which is that the customer often does not know what to do with the thing they just bought, and a customer who does not use the product does not reorder it.
They make one strong choice and hold it
David sells one product. Graza sells two. Tony's sells an argument. None of them hedge. The stores that feel sharpest are the ones that resisted the pull towards range, and category expansion is the most common way a strong food brand starts to blur. Growth does not have to mean more SKUs.
They treat speed as a revenue metric
Graza is the useful example here. The design is lovely and it is heavy, and on a mid-range phone that trade-off costs conversions. Food and drink traffic skews mobile and skews impulse, which means every hundred milliseconds is a percentage of basket. Speed is not a technical concern to be handled after launch. It is part of the store build.
FAQs
Is Shopify good for food and drink businesses?
Yes, and the reason is subscriptions rather than anything about the storefront. Food and drink is a consumable category, which means the economics only work if customers come back, and Shopify has the deepest subscription app ecosystem of any platform: Recharge, Skio, Loop and the native Shopify Subscriptions app all sit on top of native checkout.
The rest of the requirements are well covered too. Age gating for alcohol, local delivery and click and collect, bundle mechanics, integrations with fulfilment providers who handle chilled and frozen. None of that requires custom development on Shopify.
The place it gets harder is complex, weight-based or temperature-dependent shipping logic. That is solvable, but it is a build consideration rather than a checkbox.
What are the best Shopify apps for food and beverage stores?
The honest answer is that the app is less important than the decision underneath it. But for the recurring categories, this is roughly where the market sits.
For subscriptions, Recharge remains the default at scale and is what Huel runs. Skio is the newer challenger and tends to win on customer portal UX and churn tooling. Loop is a reasonable middle ground. For reviews, Judge.me and Okendo cover most needs. For email and SMS, Klaviyo is close to a standard. For support, Gorgias. For search and filtering on a large catalogue, Searchspring or Boost.
The mistake we see most often is a store with thirty apps installed, half of them loading scripts on every page, none of them owned by anybody internally. Pick the smallest stack that supports your customer journey and audit it annually. Apps are a performance cost as well as a licence cost.
Can you sell alcohol on Shopify in the UK?
Yes. Shopify permits alcohol sales and plenty of UK breweries and distilleries run on it. The obligations are yours rather than the platform's.
You will need the appropriate licence, age verification at the point it matters, responsible marketing, and a courier who will accept alcohol and handle the age check on delivery. That last one catches people out more often than the licensing does. Several Shopify apps handle age gating, but a gate on the homepage is not the same as verification at checkout, and it is worth taking legal advice on which your operation requires.
What's the best Shopify theme for food and drink stores?
For a store under a few hundred SKUs, a well-configured premium theme is usually the right answer. Impulse, Prestige and Symmetry all handle food and drink well because they were built for image-led catalogues.
The point at which a theme stops being enough is not about design taste. It is about whether your merchandising logic fits inside it. If you need brew-method filtering, or heat ratings, or recipe-to-basket, or subscription mechanics that differ by product type, you are going to be fighting the theme rather than configuring it. That is the signal to build custom, and it usually arrives before merchants expect it.
How much does it cost to build a Shopify food and drink store?
A theme-based build with a sensible app stack sits in the low tens of thousands. A custom Shopify Plus build with bespoke subscription logic, faceted search and multi-market support runs to six figures. The gap between those two numbers is not design polish, it is engineering.
The number most merchants underestimate is the ongoing one. A store is not finished at launch. The brands on this list are all iterating continuously, and the ones that stopped iterating are the ones that now feel dated. Budget for the year after launch, not just the build.
Should I use Shopify or Shopify Plus for my food brand?
Origin Coffee is on standard Shopify and has better filtering than several Plus stores on this list. That should settle the question of whether Plus is what makes a store good.
Plus earns its cost when you hit specific ceilings: multiple international storefronts, checkout customisation, high order volume, Shopify Flow automation replacing manual ops work, higher API limits for integrations. Huel needs Plus because it runs nine storefronts. A single-market roaster doing £3m does not.
If you are trying to work out which side of that line you sit on, that is a conversation worth having before the invoice rather than after. Get in touch.
Build a food and drink store that earns its second order
The stores on this list are not winning on taste. They are winning on a small number of decisions about navigation, subscription and content that most merchants never get round to making. If you want a view on which of those decisions your store is missing, talk to our team. For more inspiration, our 63 Biggest Names and Brands on Shopify article is a good next read.