Must-Have List of the Best Shopify Apps for Food Businesses

With Shopify’s robust ecosystem, it’s easier for food businesses to set up and start selling. But with more than 4.2K apps in the Shopify App Store, figuring out which apps to pick for business may be tough.

We shortlisted 18 best Shopify apps curated for your food business to help you set up your Shopify store in no time. If you’re new to Shopify, we created a complete guide to get started with Shopify for restaurants and other food and beverage businesses.

Growth of Food Businesses on Shopify

Market Size and Growth:

• The global CPG packaged food market is a giant, valued at $2 trillion in 2021.
• Analysts predict a steady growth rate (CAGR) of 2.9% from 2022 to 2028, reaching a projected market size of $2.5 trillion by 2028.

E-commerce Boom:

• Grocery emerged as the leading online CPG category in 2020, according to the Food Industry Association and NielsenIQ, capturing a whopping 44% of all CPG e-commerce sales.
• This trend continued to flourish in 2021, with online grocery sales reaching $97.7 billion through pickup, delivery, and ship-to-home services. Strategic advisory firm Brick Meets Click reports that over 70% of US households embraced online grocery shopping in 2021, placing at least one order during the year.

Leading Food and Beverage Shopify Stores

Best Shopify Apps for On-Site Optimizations for Food Businesses

Appstle 

A feature that you should be enabling on your online store, owing to the change in consumer behaviour, is subscriptions. 

Since food and beverage consumers tend to seldom change the products they're making use of, adding subscriptions can do two things for you. One, it can guarantee they buy the products from your store alone every time they need them and two, it makes things easier for them to have their products replenished without having to go through the entire purchase cycle. 

Appstle Subscriptions is one of the most rated ecommerce subscriptions app that you can use to set up weekly, monthly or even yearly subscription boxes on your store. It comes with a powerful set of features that help you customize your subscription model for better results. 

Bold Subscriptions

If you sell snacks, coffee, or other products that require multiple purchases, you can set up subscriptions for them on your product pages, Allowing your shoppers to subscribe to your products allows you to generate revenue on a recurring basis, without worrying about bringing back your shoppers for repeat purchases.

Setting up such a subscription system is easy with Bold Subscriptions. Using the Shopify app, you can allow customers to start their subscription on a weekly or monthly basis, manage these subscriptions, and even set up subscriptions through mobile.

Another app that you can explore to set up subscriptions on your store is the ReCharge app. It comes with equally powerful features that will help you set up different types of subscription models using the same app. 

Product Options

If you offer multiple flavors of a specific product or allow shoppers to include add-ons to your order, you need to make it easier for them to customize their product with just a few clicks. 

This product customization can easily be set up with the Bold Product Options app. Use this Shopify app to add dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, etc to let your shoppers customize different details of the product/order.

Nutrition Facts

Cater to your customers’ worries about health and nutrition by displaying a nutrition facts label on your Shopify product pages. This label can look exactly like the ones you see on food packaging, allowing you to convey your product’s healthiness in a visual format.

Nutrition Facts is one of the best Shopify apps for food brands. With this, you can display customized nutrition labels, complete with different nutritional components. 

Tip Jar

When taking your brand online, you would ideally want to retain don't aspects of your business that helped you run smoothly in your physical storefront. One of these features is tipping.

Many restaurants and even food businesses run on tips. You can enable this on your Shopify store with the Tip Jar app. This shows a tip jar where patrons can add a tip to their cart before checking out.

A seamless way to collect tips without being pushy about it! 

We’re Closed

If you're a restaurant, orders that come in are intended to be delivered within 45 minutes to 2 hours. So, having a customer order outside of your service hours can cause negative experiences.

You can lower these misguided expectations by placing a closed sign on your Shopify store with the We're Closed app. The Shopify app lets you virtually close your business, ensuring orders don't come in during your off-hours. This disables add to cart and checkout buttons on your Shopify store and informs shoppers when you'll be open next.

ModeMagic Product Labels

With food allergies and dietary restrictions, you need to find a way to display these important details on top of the product as the customer is scrolling through the items you offer. This is where a product label helps.

A product label is a highly visible sticker added to your product to convey information as easily as possible. You can add these product labels to your products using ModeMagic.

With this Shopify app, you can customize your product labels, make it match the rest of your Shopify store, and add relevant labels to fit your brand. 

To get started, add product labels like "Vegan", "Contains Peanuts", "Diary-Free", "Specials", and "Gluten-Free".

Pickystory

In the food and beverage industry, loyal customers are gold. Did you know the chance of selling to an existing customer is 6 times higher than attracting a new one? PickyStory capitalizes on this by helping you create enticing upsells that seamlessly fit your customers' needs.

With PickyStory, you can craft:

• Tempting Bundles: Combine complementary products for a discounted price, encouraging customers to explore more of your offerings.
• Gifting Kits: Create pre-assembled product sets perfect for different occasions, making gift-giving a breeze for your customers.
• Shop the Look Collections: Showcase how your products work together with curated combinations, inspiring a complete buying experience.

Zapiet Flexible Delivery

Whether it's store pickup, contactless delivery, or time-slotted delivery, your brand needs a system to be able to provide these flexible options to your customers and implement it seamlessly in the backend. 

Zapiet is a Shopify app that lets you provide multiple delivery options during checkout and manage your orders and their deliveries with ease.

Good to Have Shopify Apps to Enhance Shopper Experience 

EVM Spin Wheel

Your new store visitors need a compelling reason to stay and shop from you. One smart tactic many brands set up is a spin wheel to allow shoppers to spin to win a reward while providing their email address or customer details. These engaging tactics, especially when displayed at exit intent, can help you successfully capture store visitors who were likely to drop-off.

EVM Spin Wheel is the best Shopify app for spin wheel pop-ups. Set these up with the rewards you want to provide your shoppers– 10% off, free shipping, double rewards, etc– to entice your visitors to spin and leave their details. Many of these store visitors would end up purchasing because of the deal. For the ones who don't take action, you can later send marketing messages to them to bring them back to purchase.

Flits Customer Account

Especially with food orders, shoppers love to reorder. Many even end up saving an item they want to try later. But, without a simple reorder function or wishlisting, this just isn't possible on your Shopify store.

Set up these personalized features with Flits. Flits is a Shopify customer account app that allows you to transform the look of your customer account and add features like rewards, wishlists, and one-click reorder to simplify shopping experiences on your Shopify store.

Shopney

While it’s important to have a mobile-optimized website, what’s even more important to today’s digital-savvy customers is having a mobile app for your Shopify store. 

That’s where Shopney comes in! 

The mobile app builder allows you to create an app within hours. It provides merchandising capabilities with theme options, real-time experiences, personalization features, and more. The app has three plans with a 30-day trial period: Silver, Gold, and Platinum plans.

Wiser Personalized Recommendations

Often, shoppers would land on a specific product page but drop off due to their dwindling interest in the product itself. One tactic that has helped brands across industries to keep customers engaged and ensure they don't drop off is product recommendations.

You can place product recommendations on your product pages so that shoppers who reach the end of the page continue browsing rather than dropping off. 

Use Wiser to display personalized product recommendations. This is the best Shopify app for recommendations, allowing you to place multiple types of recommendations across your Shopify store.

To start, we recommend 2 types of recommendation widgets on your product pages –

1. Frequently Bought Together: A widget that shows product combos, allowing you to increase AOV.
2. Similar Items: Display items with similar tags or within similar collections.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service app that centralizes all your customer support tickets in one place. The result- your customer service executives can view all of a customer’s data, have a holistic view, and respond accordingly with the best solutions.

The app integrates live chat, social media, and text, which ensures your customers can contact you from any channel. The app’s features help increase conversion rates by enabling personalization via customer service. The app is available in five pricing plans: Starter, Basic, Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise. 

Back in Stock Alerts

If you find your food items running out quickly and in high demand, you can ensure that shoppers who land on your Shopify store looking for these items can be brought back when these products are back in stock. 

The back in stock automation allows you to set up a subscription form on your Shopify product pages when an item is unavailable. Shoppers interested in the item can subscribe to it.

When the item is back in stock, shoppers will receive a message about it, bringing them back to your Shopify store to shop the item without delays. This effortless way of bringing back shoppers to items that were out of stock can help you lower sales lost to stockouts.

You can set up this back in stock automation with the Back in Stock -Restock Alerts app. The app lets you enable 4 different communication channels, providing your customers with more options to subscribe from. Moreover, you can customize your subscription widget design and back-in-stock message, giving you complete control of how the automation looks for your customers.

Photo Reviews and Testimonials

Shoppers need an honest opinion about your products, especially food products since negative quality or misleading information can cause serious health issues. Make it easier for your shoppers to understand if your product is worth buying by displaying reviews on your Shopify store.

Reviews help you sell better. 77% of customers read product reviews before making a purchase.

The Photo Reviews and Testimonials app allows you to request for reviews and display them on your product pages. You can customize your review section within your product page to match your theme’s look as well as filter reviews. 

Tidio Live Chat

Shoppers may have questions about your products and may need more assistance about ingredients added to them, delivery times, health standards, etc. By not providing them an easy way to reach out to you to solve these queries, you end up losing shoppers who could have been loyal customers.

Provide excellent customer service to your customers with a live chat functionality on your Shopify store. Use Tidio to set up a live chat, automate common responses, and plan customer service shifts so that you can provide your customers across the globe. 

Best Shopify Apps for Marketing for Food Businesses

SmartrMail Email Marketing

Communicating with your customers is crucial to ensure that you are retaining them, building a relationship, and bringing them back for more purchases. Despite being the oldest way of communicating with your customers online, email is one of the best ways to talk to your customers. 

SmartrMail is one of the best Shopify apps for email marketing. Set up stunning email templates, send personalized campaigns, recover abandoned carts, and plan your email communication better. SmartrMail also integrates with your favorite apps to help you display recommendations within your emails, and use your analytics to plan data-driven campaigns, to name a few.

TxtCart SMS Marketing

Not all your promotions are suited for emails. If you’re sending messages about your sales or updating your shoppers about their order, an SMS is the best way to do it. SMS is sent and read almost instantly, with an open rate of 98%. Highly visible and sent even when the customer is offline, 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes. 

You can send SMS campaigns using TxtCart. The Shopify app allows you to send SMS campaigns and recover carts, even providing segments to which you can target. What makes TxtCart stand out is that the app lets you set up human-powered conversational marketing. 

With this, shoppers can interact with your SMS and ask questions. SMS experts on the other end will respond and help them find what they are looking for. This conversational aspect to your SMS can help you boost your customer engagement, increasing revenue.

ReConvert Thank You Page

Your thank you page is a goldmine of opportunity, allowing you to upsell to shoppers who are already interested in you and highly likely to shop. With the right app, you can personalize the thank you page and display offers that convert customers quickly.

You can customize your thank you page with ReConvert. This Shopify app is a thank you page builder lets you display upsell offers, show rewards, recommendations, and other personalization elements to nudge these new customers to purchase.

Recipe Kit 

Content marketing has become a go-to for most online businesses. It is a marketing tactic that focuses on 'pulling' a potential customer to you, instead of forcing them to visit your Shopify store. 

So if you're someone who has been sharing recipes on your blog for the food you serve or providing some DIY inspiration to your audience, time to make it a channel to make a sale. Recipe Kit lets you set up and optimize a blog for SEO - but more importantly, it lets you make the blog post shoppable. 

Blog posts articles Filter PRO

Another app that will help you put content marketing to work for your food business, is this one by Hue apps. It helps you set up a blog that is designed to focus on making it easier for store visitors to find content they are interested in, and eventually discover the products mentioned within.

The easy set up without programming makes this an upcoming app for DTC brands wanting to explore the capabilities of content marketing.  

Best Shopify Apps for Better Management for Food Businesses

Foodee

Managing your food orders isn’t easy with the generic Shopify dashboard. You need a food management dashboard that helps you manage orders, including how they are being delivered, etc. 

Foodee is a Shopify app built to help you manage your food orders better. Its dashboard highlights incoming orders and presents a clear list of current orders, including items in each order so that your team can manage them efficiently.

Made for food businesses specifically, this is the best Shopify app and a must-need to help you manage your orders better.

Batch Inventory & Expiry Dates

As a food business, you need to make sure your products are in the best condition, to ensure your customers remain healthy and are catered to with the highest quality.

The app essentially helps you automate how expiring inventory - especially perishables, get handled. It lets you use stock rotation methods (FEFO/ FIFO) to reduce food waste and boost profits.

With the app, you can also trace customer orders to the batch level, so you can serve them better. 

Sell better on your Shopify food brand with these best Shopify apps

We hope this extensive list helps you pick the solutions you need to launch your Shopify food brand instantly. When setting up Shopify for restaurants, it’s crucial to have a consistent design in place. We recommend reading our complete guide to setting up your restaurants or food business on Shopify or even take inspiration from BG Coffee.

However, if you have a budget and want a more professional look to your Shopify store, you should hire a Shopify design expert. Our team of Shopify design experts are well-versed in current industry trends and do thorough research on consumer needs to help you set up a winning Shopify store design.

With our years of expertise setting up Shopify stores, we will work with you to set up an online food brand to make it easier to receive orders and serve your patrons. 

Reach out to us at info@xgentech.net.