We took the store off a store platform
Cafe Spice is a premium prepared foods brand carried in elite grocery chains nationwide. Their site ran on Shopify, complete with commerce features they did not sell through — and without the accessibility compliance and content flexibility they actually needed. The redesign was largely an exercise in taking things away.
A commerce platform for a brand that sells through retailers
Cafe Spice sells through grocery. A shopper does not buy a refrigerated meal tray from a brand website and wait for it to ship; they pick it up in the prepared foods aisle at King Soopers or Whole Foods. But the site was built on Shopify, carrying the weight and the interface conventions of a store that was never the point.
Meanwhile the two things the brand did need were missing. There was no accessibility compliance, which for a company selling into national retail is a real exposure. And the content management was rigid enough that keeping the site current meant asking a developer.
The brief, then: preserve a vibrant brand while replacing the foundation under it with something focused, accessible, and manageable by the team who own it.
Every product page ends in a map, not a cart
Removing commerce did not mean thinning out the product pages. They kept the full depth a shopper wants — nutrition panel, ingredients, heating instructions, spice level, dietary tags, related meals. What changed is where that page sends you.
The site's job is to end in an aisle
Knowing which department carries the line is not trivia — it is the difference between a shopper finding the product and giving up. So the locator gets specific.
Why a headless CMS was the right trade
Moving to Storyblok meant giving up the convenience of an all-in-one platform. In exchange, the brand got a site whose presentation is under our control and whose content is under theirs.
Retrofitting a brand that already existed
Building accessibility into a new identity is one problem. Retrofitting it into an established one is a harder and more common problem: the colors are already chosen, the packaging is printed, the brand is recognized on a shelf. Nothing about it is up for renegotiation.
So the work moved to everything around the color. Type sizes and weights, the structure of headings, the way dietary tags are labelled rather than color-coded alone, focus states, alt text discipline, and markup that reads sensibly to a screen reader. Every aspect of the site was crafted to meet WCAG 2.0 Level A while the brand's vibrancy stayed untouched.
The yellow is the same yellow. What changed is that it is no longer the only thing carrying meaning.
A foundation instead of a platform
The new platform meets accessibility standards, matches the way the business actually sells, and gives the team the ability to keep the site current themselves. The streamlined content management has let them maintain an active digital presence rather than a static one, which matters for a brand whose product line keeps growing.
Most replatforming projects are described as adding capability. This one is worth remembering for the opposite reason: the clearest gain came from removing what the business was carrying and never using.
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