A recent report revealed the global food and beverage e-commerce market was valued at more than $57 million last year, and it’s expected to reach nearly $70 billion in 2023. Experts believe the increased use of smartphones has helped drive people to purchase restaurant meals, direct-to-consumer (DTC) food items, groceries, meals, and fresh ready-to-eat meals online, and they predict this already thriving market to more than double by 2027, with a projected valuation of over $140 billion in 2027.
If you’re thinking of selling food online, or you’re looking for some ways to improve your existing ecommerce website, Shopify can definitely help. Not only does Shopify come with loads of features, making it one of the most popular ecommerce platforms available today, but it also offers a free trial. Plus, there are lots of templates made especially for restaurants, grocery stores, and specialty food shops, and there are even some Shopify apps that are designed for food-related brands.
Freshly Batch Inventory
If you’re selling food online, then you definitely need to see Freshly, a Shopify app that allows you to easily track expiration dates and batches and trace perishable products. Freshly will also help you optimize your perishable inventory by forecasting demand and automatically creating discounts, and it gives you the ability to automate your store’s expiry processes with the help of stock rotation methods. This Shopify plugin even provides you with the option of showing expiration dates on your ecommerce website’s product pages, and you can include batch details on your company’s packing slips.
Allergen logos/icons
Allergen logos/icons is ideal for online stores that sell food, because it provides a simple way to add icons to product pages that tell shoppers more about what’s in each item. This Shopify plugin offers 36 different food-related icons, so you can tell people which products are free from nuts, dairy, eggs, fish, gluten, peanuts, walnuts, sugar, corn, trans fats, and crustaceans, as well as which items are cruelty-free, organic, vegan, and more.
Nutrition Facts
If you need to share nutrition facts with your customers, a practice that is legally required in multiple countries and states, this Shopify app can help! Nutrition Facts will allow you to create nutrition and supplement fact labels that you can add to your ecommerce website’s product pages, and it also offers you the ability to export the labels as PDFs. Plus, this Shopify plugin comes with support for the formats used in multiple countries, and the HTML-based nutrition labels can actually help improve your online store’s SEO.
Recipe Kit
This app is perfect for e-commerce sites dedicated to selling food because it offers an easy way to add shippable recipe cards to Shopify blogs, allowing store owners to highlight different products and show people how they can use them to make delicious meals. Recipe Kit comes with four recipe card designs to choose from, as well as a customizer, and it uses recipe data schema, which can help optimize online shops for search engines.
Takeout: Local delivery&pickup
Takeout provides a simple yet effective way for restaurants, grocery stores, and specialty food shops to offer local delivery and pickup options to their customers. With this Shopify plugin, people can schedule when they want to collect their orders or have them delivered, and it gives store owners the ability to define their delivery areas, track pending and past orders, and more.