Starting a food business is exciting, but it also comes with its own set of challenges— expiry dates, food safety regulations, and packaging. The last thing you want is to struggle with setting up your online store. That’s where Shopify for restaurants steps in to make your life easier.
Shopify is the best platform to get your food business online fast. Think of it this way. When a person gets hungry nowadays, what’s the first thing they do? They take out their smartphones and go online. If you love to cook and dream of opening your own online food store, you are in the right place.
Let’s not waste any time and get straight to the first topic.
How to Sell Food Online in 6 Steps?
Step 1: Can You Cook or Not?
The best business ideas start with passion. The same logic applies to selling food on the internet. For example, let’s say you like making strawberry jam when family and friends come over. You grow organic strawberries in your backyard. That’s a great place to start your online food business of jams.
Start by finding your food niche. What makes your cooking unique? Whether you’re all about organic jams, gluten-free baked goods, or homemade sauces, pinpoint what makes your product stand out.
Step 2: Licences and Laws
Anything that relates to health and safety requires a license from the government. Cooking and selling food items come under this category. There are many government organizations that monitor food safety regulations for the public.
Before you dive into the online food business, make sure you have the appropriate licences and registrations. Get in touch with your local health department to acquire the necessary licenses and permits. Compliance is key to running a smooth business!
Step 3: Choose Your Food Business Model
Cloudkitchen, selling from home, restaurants, and dropshipping, there are multiple models in the food business. Ask yourself two important questions:
1. Can I cook food or hire people to cook?
2. From where should I start my online food business?
If you are cooking food on your own, decide whether to start at home or rent a commercial kitchen place. You also have options for restaurants, cloud kitchens, or packaged food products. If you are going with Cloudkitchen, you can use Shopify for Cloudkitchen to manage your online business easily.
If you are passionate about food and don’t know how to cook, you can try dropshipping. For example, if you have a contact who is making and selling jams, you can bring this brand to a new market.
Pro tip: Shopify for restaurants makes it easy to manage everything from orders to payments and customer interactions—all in one seamless platform.
Shopify applications such as Stellar Delivery Date & Pickup help food store owners add ‘in-store pickup’ and ‘local delivery’ features to their stores. It doesn’t matter if you have one location or multiple locations; Stellar helps you add an in-store pickup option based on the customer’s nearest store.
For local delivery, store owners can use Stellar to add a postal code option, allowing customers to select their preferred date and time.
Step 4: Source the Ingredients
Let’s again take the example of jam, because why not? The ingredients to make a jam include: fruit, sugar, lemon juice, and other herbs & nuts to enhance the flavour.
You cannot grow everything in your garden. Reach out to local suppliers for your ingredients. It’s about quality, freshness, and cooking something delicious. Start with small batches, and as demand grows, so can your ingredient sourcing.
Step 5: Build Your Brand
Start with your website. Click excellent images, build product pages, and write about the taste, packaging, and health benefits if needed.
Building a strong food brand can be tough—it’s hard to sell the taste of your dishes online. But here’s the trick: let your customers tell the story for you! Collect testimonials and feedback, and display them proudly in your store. They’ll be your best advocates.
The menu is an important part of your food business. With Shopify for restaurants, you can build an online menu that goes with your theme, helping you build your brand.
Step 6: Inventory and Order Management
In the food business, the shelf life of your inventory is shorter than in other industries. Plus, once expired, it’s harmful to your customers. Use batch numbers and bar codes to manage your inventory in a better way.
If you choose Shopify for restaurants, Shopify POS is a great omnichannel solution to manage order fullfilment for your physical restaurant and its online presence. There are many exciting features, such as ‘Product QR codes’. You can place them on tables and let the customer scan and order. This streamlines the order processing.
Shopify POS also allows restaurant owners to convert any mobile device into a point of sale system. This is useful if you are running a cafe, food truck, or pizzeria where there is a high volume of requests at specific times.
Other benefits of Shopify POS for restaurants include:
Integrated Payments
Offering a variety of payment options makes it easy for restaurants to process payments.
Staff Management
Ensures a smooth management of staff, their training, salary, and schedule.
Multi-location Support
Provides a centralized management system for restaurant owners with multiple locations.
Now that we have gone through the steps to start an online food business, let’s learn how Shopify for restaurants is perfect for building your food business.
E-commerce for Restaurants: Benefits of Going Online with Shopify
More and more restaurants are turning online to cater to a wide variety of customers. They need a simple drag-and-drop ecommerce platform to set up their restaurant. Choosing Shopify for restaurants helps owners in a variety of ways.
Let’s see a few important benefits.
Quick Setup
Shopify offers easy-to-use themes specifically designed for restaurants. This enables a fast setup of your online restaurant without requiring any coding skills.
A look at Shopify themes for restaurants
Mobile Optimization
Shopify for restaurants offer highly responsive themes. This makes restaurant websites look great on mobile devices, making it easy for customers to interact with them.
Shopify helps restaurant owners create digital menus that match their brand. These include customization options, pricing, product images, and special offers.
Ordering & Delivery
Restaurant owners can quickly set up online ordering systems with Shopify POS and integrate them with their offline setup.
Customer Engagement Tools
With Shopify for restaurants, owners can engage with customers through different channels. These include email, social media, personal messaging, and loyalty programs.
The Shopify App Store
The Shopify app store has thousands of applications that help your restaurants sell more. For example, apps like Stellar help restaurant owners to offer local delivery services and in-store pickup.
Let’s look at a case study to understand why Shopify for restaurants is great for food business owners.
Maine Lobster Now is an online seafood delivery service located in Maine, United States.
Before they had their Shopify restaurant up and running, they faced unique challenges such as customized checkout experience and shipping. Fresh seafood needs to be delivered quickly, and the quantity needs to be set right for packaging.
They first started with Magento, but the developer dependency took time and effort to customize the store.
The solution? Shopify – An e-commerce platform with a customized checkout and app store to add features for delivery. With easy-to-build Shopify themes and an app ecosystem that gets you tools for marketing, shipping, and order fulfillment, their conversion rate increased by 69%.
“When you go to launch the Shopify apps, you just pick what you want, install and configure them, and they work”
Julian Klenda — Founder and CEO, Maine Lobsters Now
Click here to read the full Shopify case study.
E-commerce for Restaurants: Take Your Food Business Online
Selling food on the internet is not as easy as it sounds. But it can be made easy with a passion for cooking and e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
As your restaurant grows, Shopify’s flexible platform allows easy expansion into new markets or additional sales channels like catering or event bookings. Whether you want to open a restaurant, sell packaged food, or start dropshipping food items, Shopify helps you get online fast so that you can keep cooking.
FAQs
1. Can I get into the online food business if I don’t know how to cook?
Yes. You can start dropshipping packaged food items of other brands and sell them to a new market.
2. Do I need a licence to sell food online in the United States?
Yes. You need a licence to sell food online in the U.S. There are different types of licences available based on your food business model and the type of food you sell. Contact your local health department to get more details.
3. How to sell food online from home?
First, find your niche and get the local licenses and permits. Next, find a good CMS like Shopify with drag and drop features where you can build your store. Get ingredients for preparing your food and start selling locally from home. Slowly grow your business.
4. Which online platform is best for a food business?
Shopify for restaurants is our preferred choice if you want to go into the food business. Other platforms include Squarespace and Wix.
5. Which Shopify applications should I use if I open an online restaurant?
Stellar, ServeUp, and iWeb Order Printer are some of the best Shopify applications for restaurants.
About the author
Vineet Nair
Vineet is an experienced content strategist with expertise in the ecommerce domain and a keen interest in Shopify. He aims to help Shopify merchants thrive in this competitive environment with technical solutions and thoughtfully structured content.