Food & Beverage
The F&B businesses I work with are specialty distributors, craft beverage producers, multi-location specialty restaurants, and regional CPG brands. They're typically $3M to $50M in revenue, owner-operated, with a tech stack that grew opportunistically and now needs a senior hand.
The typical stack, the typical pain.
The typical stack
Most F&B businesses in this range run on a familiar set of tools: Square or Toast at the front, Shopify or a custom DTC build for the web, Mailchimp for customers, QuickBooks for the books, and somewhere in there a custom ordering tool or wholesale portal built three to seven years ago.
Individually each tool is fine. As a stack they don't talk to each other. The customer record lives in four places. Inventory reconciliation happens on Monday morning in a spreadsheet.
The typical pain
The DTC channel is half-built. Wholesale ordering still runs on email and spreadsheets. There's no customer record that follows a buyer across in-store, web, and wholesale.
Someone, usually the operator or their second-in-command, spends four hours every Monday shuttling data between systems. They know it shouldn't be that way. They don't have a senior tech voice in the room to tell them what to do about it.
What the work looks like for an F&B business.
Modernization
Most F&B custom apps I see are 4–7 years old, written by a vendor who's no longer responsive, and missing the integrations the business has since outgrown. We audit, decide replace-vs-rebuild per piece, and ship the first integration.
Fractional
Many F&B operators reach the point where they're making technical calls without a senior tech voice in the room: which vendor to pick, whether to build or buy, when to walk away from a tool. That's the moment a fractional engagement pays for itself in the first month.
AI Integration
F&B operations are full of automatable workflows like wholesale order routing, inventory reconciliation, and customer follow-up, all of which AI handles well right now. The useful wins aren't chatbots; they're the unglamorous Monday-morning workflows.
Product Strategy
If you're building a customer-facing app or wholesale portal and you're not sure what to keep and what to cut, that's a two-week strategy sprint. Cheap insurance against three months of bad building.
Project notes tagged to F&B.
AI-Accelerated Modernization
How AI is shifting the economics of modernizing a four-year-old custom app, and which small businesses benefit most.
When a Fractional CTO Actually Helps
The moments inside a small business where a fractional engagement pays for itself in the first month, and the moments it doesn't.
Discovery Isn't Research
Two weeks of customer-interview-shaped discovery isn't user research. Why I keep them separate, and what each is actually for.
Sound familiar?
If any of this matches your back office, I'd be glad to talk.
Most F&B engagements start with a one-week stack audit at a fixed fee. You get back a written diagnosis and a recommended next step.