Most food and beverage brands evaluating an email or retention partner end up staring at the same wall of impressive numbers: 65x ROI here, 293% revenue growth there, 40% fewer spam complaints somewhere else. Those numbers are real, but they are also incomplete on their own. A case study is only useful if you can see what the business looked like before the work started, what specifically changed, and what happened to revenue as a result, not just to a platform-attributed metric.
Food and beverage is a category where this scrutiny matters more than most. These are consumable products with short consideration cycles and fast repurchase windows, which is exactly why email performs so well here and exactly why it is easy to dress up a mediocre program with a flattering statistic. This article walks through documented food and beverage email case studies, starting with Retention Side’s own work with Hedonism Wines, and extracts the retention mechanics that actually transfer to your brand.
How to read a food and beverage email case study
Before looking at any specific result, it helps to have a filter for separating a real retention process from a number that looks good in isolation.
Four things are worth checking on every case study you’re handed by a prospective partner:
- Baseline and timeframe. Was the “before” state measured over a comparable period to the “after” state? A single strong quarter compared against a weak prior quarter tells you less than a trailing 12-month comparison.
- Attribution model. Platform-attributed revenue (what Klaviyo or another ESP reports as “Klaviyo-attributed”) is not the same as verified incremental revenue to the business. Both are useful, but they answer different questions.
- What got fixed first. Deliverability and list health problems mask everything downstream. If a case study jumps straight to segmentation or flow wins without addressing whether email was landing in the inbox at all, ask what the actual open and delivery rates looked like beforehand.
- Which metric moved. Returning customer rate, retention-channel revenue as a share of total revenue, and flow conversion rate tell you about the underlying system. Open rate alone, without list health context, tells you comparatively little.
With that framework in place, here are the case studies worth studying, starting with the one Retention Side ran directly.
Case 1: Retention Side and Hedonism Wines
Hedonism Wines is a Mayfair-based fine wine and spirits boutique carrying more than 6,500 wines and 3,000 spirits, shipping globally, and operating in a category where paid acquisition is structurally limited. Alcohol brands run into hard restrictions across Meta, Google, and TikTok, plus geo-restrictions and age-gating that cap how much paid reach is even available. That makes owned channels, especially email, close to non-negotiable rather than optional.
When Retention Side started the engagement in October 2025, Hedonism had a genuinely large asset sitting mostly idle: a 100,000-plus subscriber list on Mailchimp with no segmentation, used purely as a broadcast tool. Between January and September 2025, the average open rate across that list was 11.2%. That is not a list problem in the sense of size, it is a deliverability and relevance problem dressed up as a list problem.
The work covered four areas:
- Migration and list audit. The list was audited and pruned before a single contact moved from Mailchimp to Klaviyo, rather than migrating the existing hygiene problems into a new platform.
- Deliverability recovery. This meant list hygiene, suppression of unengaged contacts, reduced sending volume, and a structured warm-up of the new sending domain and IP, the standard prerequisites for rebuilding inbox placement.
- Segmentation by product interest. Browse activity, purchase history, category affinity, and producer interest were used to build conditional flow splits, which matters enormously in a catalog spanning 10,000-plus SKUs across wildly different price points and categories.
- Design and flow architecture. A full mobile-first, dark-mode-ready design overhaul paired with acquisition-side flow priorities: welcome series, browse abandonment, and add-to-cart and checkout abandonment, with cross-sell flows across the full catalog in build.
From October 2025 through March 2026, average open rate reached 79.65%, up from that 11.2% baseline on the same list and largely the same audience. Email revenue increased more than 500% over that period, and Retention Side ties that growth to a real increase in overall business revenue rather than a shift in attribution between channels.
The takeaway that generalizes beyond wine and spirits: a large list is worthless as a broadcast tool. Food and beverage email marketing case studies that skip the deliverability chapter are usually skipping the part that made everything else possible.
Case 2: Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit
Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit sells a genuinely habitual product, biscuits, with customers averaging roughly two purchases per year before the brand changed anything. That two-order average is the whole story: the entire growth opportunity sat in getting a customer from order one to order two, and from order two to order three.
Since launching loyalty flows in Klaviyo in June 2023, the brand has seen 62.5% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, 157.8% year-over-year growth in revenue from flows specifically, and 77.2% year-over-year growth in flow placed order rate. The mechanic behind those numbers is straightforward: flows trigger a V.I.B. status alert on a customer’s second order and a free shipping alert on the third, with incentives scaling to yearly order total rather than firing as blanket discounts to everyone.
The lesson for any F&B brand: the second-order bridge is where repeat rate is actually won, and behavior-triggered incentives consistently outperform calendar-based blanket discounts because they reward the action you actually want repeated.
Case 3: Naked Nutrition and predictive replenishment
Naked Nutrition, working with the platform Relo, tackled a problem common to consumable brands: a blanket 30-day replenishment flow that assumed every customer, on every SKU, used up their product at the same rate. In reality, usage windows vary widely by SKU and by order composition; a protein powder subscriber and a one-time snack buyer do not run out of product on the same schedule.
Replacing the blanket flow with predictive, per-SKU replenishment timing produced a 43% increase in repeat orders and a 25x return on the investment in the replenishment system.
This case pairs directly with Retention Side’s own data on the category: food and beverage compresses roughly 64% of its annual repeat purchase activity into the first 30 days after purchase, compared to a much slower curve in durable categories. That compression is exactly why replenishment timing needs to follow actual product usage rather than a generic calendar rule. A 30-day default might work for one SKU and completely miss the window for another.
Case 4: Brodo and subscription-aware segmentation
Brodo, a subscription-heavy bone broth brand running WooCommerce alongside Klaviyo, grew Klaviyo-attributed revenue 293% year-over-year in 2024, with 31% of that year’s subscription purchases attributed to Klaviyo and a 7x year-over-year increase in abandoned cart flow revenue.
The mechanic worth noting isn’t the growth number itself, it’s the segmentation decision underneath it. Brodo separates subscription buyers from non-subscription buyers before doing much else, and treats SMS as an early-access channel for rare discounts rather than a duplicate of email. That’s a channel-role decision, not just a segmentation exercise: SMS earns a distinct job in the mix instead of repeating what email already does.
Case 5: Coffee Beanery and cadence control
Coffee Beanery’s starting problem was overcommunication, not undercommunication. Running email through Klaviyo and SMS through a separate platform (Postscript) meant two systems making independent decisions about when to message the same customer, with no shared view of frequency.
Consolidating email and SMS into a single platform, combined with two-step forms that collect category preference data upfront, produced 65x Klaviyo ROI in Q4 2024, 29% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, and 47% of ecommerce revenue coming from Klaviyo in that quarter. Notably, the brand’s subscription customer base spans more than 40 years of tenure, which says something about how durable a well-managed cadence can be for repeat coffee purchasing.
The broader point: cadence control across channels is a retention decision, not a tooling detail you hand off and forget. When two channels operate independently, you get more messages, not more relevance.
Case 6: Garrett Popcorn and Chukar Cherries
These two cases share a theme even though the specific mechanics differ: segmenting by engagement level protects deliverability and compounds flow performance over time.
Garrett Popcorn built 15 engaged and hyper-engaged segments powering an engagement-track strategy, which contributed to a 40% year-over-year reduction in spam complaints and a predicted next-order segment that generated more than $12,200 in a single month at four times the revenue per recipient of campaigns overall. Over the past year, the brand reports 113x ROI from combined email and SMS through Klaviyo.
Chukar Cherries took a different route to a similar place: after hiring an agency to revamp flows in 2021 (welcome incentives, abandoned checkout, cross-sell, VIP flows), the brand saw flow revenue grow 4x between 2020 and 2022, annual Klaviyo revenue grow 32.7% over the same window, and 122.3x ROI by 2022. Notably, Q4 sends run at twice the frequency of the rest of the year, a deliberate seasonal cadence decision rather than a flat send schedule.
The shared lesson: segmentation by engagement isn’t just a deliverability safeguard, it’s what makes flows compound instead of plateau.
Case 7: Harney & Sons and Fishwife
Two shorter entries worth noting for different reasons. Harney & Sons consolidated a fragmented stack, previously split across Attentive for SMS and separate loyalty and reviews platforms, into Klaviyo, and reported 114x ROI in Q4 2024 along with 13% year-over-year growth in revenue per email recipient and 34% growth in flow click rate. The lesson is similar to Coffee Beanery’s: fragmentation across tools creates blind spots that consolidation removes.
Fishwife scaled a founder-run program through refreshed email and SMS funnels and continuous A/B testing, reporting 67x year-to-date Klaviyo ROI, 41% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, and 138% year-over-year growth in SMS revenue, including a 110% jump in the month a Shark Tank appearance aired. The takeaway here is that a well-built retention foundation is what lets a brand capture a demand spike instead of just riding it out.
What the successful programs share
Strip away the platform-specific ROI multiples, which cannot be fairly ranked against each other given their differing timeframes and attribution methods, and a consistent pattern emerges across every case above.
Deliverability comes first. Hedonism’s 500%+ revenue increase started with fixing inbox placement, not with a clever flow. No amount of segmentation matters if your emails are landing in spam.
Post-purchase timing follows the product, not the calendar. Naked Nutrition’s 43% lift came from replacing a fixed 30-day rule with per-SKU timing. Retention Side structures this as a sequence: order confirmation on day 0-1, product education around day 2-5 post-delivery, a replenishment or cross-sell prompt at day 7-10, a review request at day 14-21, and a second-purchase bridge at day 18-25, timed to F&B’s tendency to compress most annual repeat purchasing into that first 30-day window. Customers who lapse past that window shift into a win-back track, typically leading with value before any incentive appears.
Engagement-based segmentation protects the list and compounds flow revenue. Garrett Popcorn and Chukar Cherries both show this from different angles: one through spam complaint reduction, the other through multi-year flow revenue growth.
The second-order bridge decides repeat rate. Callie’s engineered this directly with status triggers on order two and three. It is worth treating as its own strategic milestone, not just a byproduct of general lifecycle marketing.
Channel mix expands only where behavior supports it. Brodo’s SMS-for-early-access model and Coffee Beanery’s cadence consolidation both show channels being added or coordinated because customer behavior called for it, not because more channels seemed like more coverage.
Applying this to your brand
Run your own program against a short diagnostic before comparing agencies or platforms further:
- What is your current open rate baseline, and has anyone audited list hygiene and deliverability health in the last 90 days?
- Does your flow coverage actually map to your product’s repurchase cycle, or is it running on a generic template?
- What percentage of first-time buyers reach a second order within your category’s typical repeat window, and do you have a flow specifically built to influence that transition?
- Is your campaign segmentation built around purchase behavior and engagement level, or is it still one list receiving every send?
- Is each channel in your mix (email, SMS, loyalty, direct mail) doing a distinct job, or duplicating what another channel already covers?
If more than one of those has an uncertain answer, that’s the gap worth closing before adding more spend to acquisition.
Choosing a retention partner based on real evidence
When you’re evaluating who should run this work, ask for the same things this article asked of every case study above: a documented before-and-after on business metrics, not just platform-attributed ones, a clear explanation of what got fixed first, and evidence that the improvement extended across the retention system rather than one isolated channel. Retention Side’s case studies and email marketing services pages lay out exactly that kind of documentation, including the Hedonism Wines results discussed above. Whoever you choose, hold their claims to the same standard you’d hold a case study you found on your own.