What’s your origin story? Grandma’s favorite recipe? An idea to plug a gap in the market? A take on your favorite dish? No doubt your company founders started developing their foods and products in their own kitchens, selling to family, friends, and neighbors, and eventually developing a customer base.
In very little time, they likely outgrew the kitchen and either developed a commercial kitchen or found a partner to assist, but fulfillment probably remained in-house – in a spare room, then the garage, and eventually to a commercial space. Shipping volumes were doable and the team wanted control over product quality. It worked. Then.
But with each stage of growth, the space, labor, and systems required to fulfill orders increase far faster than most teams expect. Sooner or later, the idea for outsourcing will materialize.
When does it actually make sense to outsource?
The right time for you will be unique for your organization. The right moment usually reveals itself through operational signals that your business has reached a new stage of growth.
To help you, we’ve collected feedback from some of our customers who’ve gone through it to provide you with guidance so you can verify if you’ve reached that point. Here are some of the clearest indicators that a perishable brand may be ready to transition from internal fulfillment to a specialized perishable fulfillment partner.
- Your Team Is Spending More Time Packing Boxes Than Producing Your Product and Growing Your Business
Many founders and operations leaders recognize this moment immediately. It’s a daily operational burden to ensure orders are delivered as per customer expectations.
Leadership teams find themselves managing warehouse staff, coordinating carrier pickups, sourcing packaging materials, and troubleshooting shipping issues. These activities are exacerbated during peak season and order surges, which you could hire for, but become muted during low season. Do you now fire the people and systems you’ve just invested in?
Meanwhile, the activities that grow your business – product development, marketing, partnerships, and customer growth – receive less attention and stall.
Adam DeJulius, President of Oma’s Pride, a 4th generation, Connecticut-based all-natural raw pet food producer, commented: “Our mission is to feed as many pets clean, natural, healthy foods, to help them live a longer, healthier life throughout the United States.”
His team added: “One of the biggest pain points with handling our own fulfillment was the fact we were taking so much resource, time, energy, effort, and ultimately money [and putting it] into doing something that was like running another business… We were spending too much time on this part of the process and not enough time on the actual health of the business.”
- Shipping Delays Start Affecting Customer Experience
One immediate issue your customers will notice is a long shipping delay. A reasonable expectation is for orders to arrive within 3-4 days, sooner if the customer is in a major city. Shipping delays will test the ability of your packaging and coolant calculations to maintain your product’s frozen integrity too.
Back to Oma’s Pride: “If someone places an order, they want their order within three to five days, right? You’re trying to sell the product that you’re manufacturing, which is a whole separate business. And then we were also trying to ship the product that we sold after we made it, which is a whole separate business. The time spent on our end was just too spread thin.
We were so inundated with order volume that we just couldn’t get all these orders out.
It came to the point where we all sort of looked at each other and said like, hey, if we really want to scale this thing and bring it to the moon, we can’t run all these different businesses. And that’s when we started to look for partners.”
Many brands don’t just risk delays – they overpay to avoid them, defaulting to overnight shipping, oversized packaging, and excessive coolant. This can leave customers with more packaging to deal with as well.
- Mis-Picks Really Affect Customer Experience
Another immediate issue your customers will notice is mis-picks. One single mis-pick can lead to a 30% churn probability. Repeated mis-picks? You’re looking at up to 90% churn probability.
Mis-picks occur most frequently during high-volume order picking periods. This could be the result of a promotion you’ve run where you’ve invested more time and money to generate more sales. Mis-picks could cancel-out that investment and even end up costing you.
Rebecca Linz, VP Logistics with Force of Nature, a purveyor of beef, bison, and other proteins said: “Mis-pick is my least favorite word. A mis-pick is essentially when our customer orders a certain set of products and unfortunately they don’t get that exact set of products. It could be in our case they ordered a ribeye steak and they got a flank steak instead. Both are great products. But your customer who ordered it is not going to be happy with that exchange.
It’s just frankly really expensive to have to reship product, to have to refund folks and things like that. So mis-picks are really not a good thing.”
- Order Volume Is Growing Faster Than Your Infrastructure
In-house fulfillment can work well up to a certain scale, but beyond that point, growth creates operational friction:
- Warehouses running out of freezer space for products and coolant, and dry space for packaging
- Difficulty hiring and training seasonal fulfillment staff
- Seasonal demand spikes overwhelming internal capacity
- Overstretched resources such as forklifts, cooling equipment, and systems
Many companies underestimate how quickly fulfillment operations can become a capital-intensive logistics business within a perishable product brand. It’s not just a decision about the increase in rent at a larger facility.
If protecting product quality is becoming increasingly difficult as volumes grow, it may be time to consider external expertise.
Mike Tonetti, CEO of FultonFishMarket.com, said “Seafood is really seasonal, and so our business would fluctuate so much. It was just really unmanageable.”
- You Don’t Have a Clear Plan to Support Your Nationwide Expansion Strategy
Perishable shipping costs are driven by several factors: transit time, packaging size, coolant materials, carrier routing, inventory location. Distributing from a single location, even in an advantageous location, will still limit your ability to deliver to customers across the country with a uniform unboxing experience or controlled costs.
Maybe you’re considering overnight air shipping to provide respectable delivery times for far away customers? That will just increase your shipping costs and ruin your unit economics.
Rebecca Linz: “We need to get our product to our consumers within two days. So it’s really important our network enables that.”
Mike Tonetti: “A big part of [our $500k shipping savings with ColdTrack] was being able to choose facilities that were closer to our customer base as opposed to having to put all the shipments onto planes.”
The Evolution of Perishable Fulfillment
Your focus is on providing the best product you can at a fair price and growing your business cost-effectively. Perishable fulfillment solution providers are focused on delivering scalable storage, packing, and shipping services as cost-effectively as possible. When leadership time shifts toward fulfillment logistics rather than product and customer strategy, outsourcing often becomes the most efficient path forward.
The right partner encourages your growth by taking on some or all of your fulfillment process so you can focus on why you got into business in the first place.
- Leverage Your Partner’s Perishable Shipping Purchasing Power
Maybe you ship hundreds of orders a week and achieve volume pricing tiers. You won’t match the carrier network options or volumes shipped by perishable fulfillment solution providers. By outsourcing shipping, you still maintain your fulfillment activities in-house, but you now leverage your partner’s carrier network, pricings, and even coolant logic and cartonization recommendations that could reduce the size and weight of your shipments, those in-turn reduce your rates further.
Specialized fulfillment providers use systems that calculate the optimal packaging configuration, coolant quantity, and carrier routing for each order. This allows brands to maintain product integrity without relying on expensive safety margin shipping practices.
Mike: “The shipping savings have been great. In our first year, we probably saved half a million dollars.” - Turn Your Focus to Growing Your Business
Work with your new fulfillment partner to developing your ideal SOP and unboxing experience, then leverage their expertise to optimize resource use, coolant, carrier mix, and visibility. Seasonality poses no problem and your partner’s network will allow you to expand your customer base throughout the USA and yet still maintain 48hour and under time-in-transit shipping using cost-effective ground-based services and rates.
Said Adam: “[Outsourcing] allows to focus on what we do best.”
Oma’s Pride: “Our goal was to have an even [cost] swap occur. We’ve never really done this before, but if we can essentially transfer costs and not worry about it, that would be enough savings on our end. We ended up saving between 15 to 20% in total A to Z costs by moving it out of house.”
Outsourcing allows brands to scale capacity without committing to new facilities, long-term labor expansion, or complex logistics systems.
At a certain point, the question is no longer whether you can continue fulfilling orders in-house – it’s whether doing so is holding your business back. Let’s chat.
