The brief
Cheese Country is a specialty cheese retailer with brick-and-mortar locations and an emerging e-commerce business. Pre-engagement, online sales were 8% of revenue and growing slowly — held back by a clunky checkout, broken shipping logic for cold-chain products, and a discovery problem (customers couldn't find the cheese they wanted because the catalogue wasn't structured for browsing).
What we did
Catalogue restructure
700+ SKUs organized by milk type (cow, goat, sheep, mixed), region of origin, age, texture, and pairing recommendations. Each cheese with photography, taste profile, ingredients, allergens, and storage instructions. Filter and search worked across all of these dimensions.
Cold-chain shipping logic
Shipping calculation that accounted for distance, transit time, and ambient temperature — a cheese shipped in July to a warm-climate destination needs different packaging and insulation than the same cheese to a cooler destination in March. The shipping engine selected packaging materials and quoted prices based on real cold-chain math, not a flat lookup table.
Pairing recommendation engine
For every cheese, the system surfaced recommended pairings — wines, breads, jams, charcuterie. A simple recommendation model trained on the brick-and-mortar staff's curation choices. The same model drove cart-page upsells.
Subscription box
A monthly cheese-discovery subscription with three tiers, integrated with the shipping logic. Subscribers receive a curated selection with tasting notes and pairing suggestions. The subscription engine handled vacation pauses, gift gifting, and skip-a-month requests without staff intervention.
Content-led SEO
Long-form pieces on cheese categories, regions, and pairings — written by the brick-and-mortar staff with editing support from us. Each piece linked to specific products. Organic traffic to product pages doubled within four months.
What we learned
Specialty food e-commerce is bottlenecked by two things: discovery (the customer has to find what they want in a catalogue that isn't a supermarket aisle) and trust (the customer has to believe the product will arrive in good condition). Both are solvable, but neither is solved by a generic Shopify theme. The recommendation engine and the cold-chain shipping logic were the two highest-ROI engineering investments in the project.
Related
For other e-commerce builds with category complexity: /online-store-development. For content-led SEO in retail: /seo-promotion.
Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: Cheese Country. Year: 2022–2024.