A Catalog Customers Couldn't Navigate Was Leaving Money on the Table

Gold Seal Distributing has more than five decades of distribution experience and wants to be the go-to beverage and food distributor for coffee shops and cafés across Colorado's Front Range. Based in Loveland, they serve hundreds of accounts with everything from syrups and chai to grab-and-go food, baked goods, and supplies: a wide, specialized assortment built for the independent coffee shop operator.

But they had a problem: The products were good, but no one could find them.

Gold Seal's previous ordering portal was functional but outdated. Search required exact matches: type "burritos" to find burritos. Type "burr" and get nothing. Type "lavender" hoping to surface every lavender-flavored product in the catalog and come up empty. For a distributor whose value is its breadth, a search tool that couldn't surface that breadth was costing real revenue.

The result was a phrase Sean O'Neill, Gold Seal's General Manager, heard constantly from customers, both new accounts and long-tenured ones: "We didn't know you carried that." Not as a compliment but as a missed sale.

"It didn't matter," Sean said. "Customers that have been with us for two months and customers that have been with us for two years had the same opinion."

Getting information out to customers wasn't any easier. Gold Seal had no reliable channel for communicating new products, pricing changes, holiday delivery schedules, or promotions. They were printing flyers, handing them out on deliveries, and blasting mass emails that frequently went to spam. Response rates were low and hard to measure.

The competitive stakes made it urgent. Broadliners and local competitors in the region had more modern ordering platforms. For prospective accounts weighing their options, a clunky portal was a real reason to go elsewhere.

"That was a line of demarcation," Sean said. "If we were trying to get someone to switch over from a competitor, or going into a new account — that was a key factor in them making the decision not to go with us."

A Modern Storefront That Sells the Full Catalog

Gold Seal's president came across Pepper through a contact already using the platform. The pitch was straightforward: a modern, consumer-grade ordering experience that could surface their full catalog, handle payments, and give them a direct channel to communicate with customers, all in one place.

The "all in one" piece mattered. Gold Seal had previously run ordering and payments through separate platforms. Sean didn't want customers managing two logins for two functions. Pepper consolidated both.

Implementation ran from contract signing in October through a full launch in February — a four-month turnaround that Sean described as faster and smoother than expected. Customer data, product catalog, pricing, and images all migrated without Gold Seal having to handle it manually. Hiccups along the way were resolved quickly by the Pepper team, with particular attention to how discounts displayed in the cart and how to structure ads and promos effectively.

"Everyone on the Pepper team was great to work with," Sean said. "And whenever we did come up with barriers, they helped us find solutions and tailor things to how we were hoping it would be presented to our customers."

A Full Catalog That Customers Are Actually Finding

Since launch, the entire customer base have placed orders through the platform - a full cutover. The migration required minimal manual customer setup; the team's post-launch focus shifted entirely to getting out into the market, reconnecting with accounts in person, and walking them through what the new platform could do.

The off-order-guide numbers tell the story on discoverability: In the early weeks, 7% of all items ordered were products outside a customer's standard order guide. Items that customers found by browsing, not by being told. Sean tracks it several times a week.

"We heard 'we didn't know you carried that' a bunch of times — in a negative connotation," he said. "Now it's turned into 'we didn't know you carried that!' in a positive connotation. Because they're finding it on their own."

Gold Seal runs two to three in-app campaigns at any given time and is still learning what drives the best response. Printed flyers and mass emails are gone. When a new product launches or a seasonal item goes on sale, it shows up as a banner in the app, visible to every customer the next time they open it to order.

Gold Seal turned off their previous ordering platform entirely in early April. For Sean, the real measure of what Pepper can do is just beginning.

"I'm excited to see what the future holds for us. To see the growth and where the opportunity is going to lie for us to leverage the app even more than we're doing now."

Gold Seal Distributing is a beverage and food distributor based in Loveland, Colorado, serving coffee shops and cafés across the Front Range with more than five decades of distribution experience.