Before a customer places an order, Shopify helps them discover Rōti’s food, find a restaurant, and choose the right path for individual or catering orders.
Rōti is a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant brand serving customizable bowls, salads, wraps, and pitas built around fresh ingredients and bold flavor. Their team describes the brand as a bright, colorful reprieve for busy customers who want healthy food without giving up flavor.
After Rōti joined Edible Brands, the team worked with Barrel to replace their custom-coded site with Shopify and carry more of the restaurant experience online. The new storefront brings menus, locations, catering, loyalty, and paths to ordering into one customer experience, while giving marketing and ecommerce teams direct control as menus, locations, and campaigns change.
With Shopify, Rōti has:
- Increased conversion rate 132% year over year, alongside double-digit growth in engagement rate, time on site, and events per session
- Increased average order value 4% year over year across Rōti’s ordering experience
- One customer-facing discovery experience connecting menus, locations, catering, loyalty, and restaurant ordering paths
- A Shopify foundation designed to support future commerce for Rōti, including merchandise and their signature sauces
- Routine site updates managed by marketing and ecommerce teams without developer support
The challenge
Outgrowing a custom-coded site
Rōti’s previous site was built on custom code. Routine updates required developer support, making it harder for marketing and ecommerce teams to keep menus, restaurant information, and campaigns current.
Rōti also needed to make online ordering easier for customers. The site had to help them find a restaurant, explore the menu, learn about catering, and ultimately choose a location and place an order. That meant creating a more useful journey from initial discovery to purchase.
Rōti also saw an opportunity down the road to bottle and sell their signature sauces, which anchor their menu. While that business had not yet launched, the team wanted a platform that could support packaged-product commerce without requiring another storefront.
The solution
Helping customers find the right ordering path
Shopify was not the team’s first stop. Rōti had also considered WordPress and other content management systems because a fast-casual restaurant site often routes transactions to a separate ordering platform.
Ultimately, the team chose Shopify because it gives them space to showcase the food, build menu experiences, help customers find restaurants, explain catering, and guide customers to the right ordering path. The team saw how Shopify could support the brand and menu experience now, fit Edible Brands’ shared ecommerce model, and support packaged-product commerce later. They saw it as the customer-facing brand and discovery layer in their restaurant technology stack.
Shopify is part of that discovery layer. It’s the upper funnel in the customer’s purchase path to learn and convert with Rōti.
Operationally, individual meal orders are currently handed off to Thanx, while catering orders are handed off to Toast. Each specialized system completes the transaction it was built for. Rōti designed those transitions as part of one customer journey rather than treating Shopify as a replacement for restaurant operations.
Customers explore the menu and product story in Shopify, then move to the appropriate ordering system when they’re ready to buy. Each platform handles the job it was built to do.
Rebuilding the brand with Barrel
Barrel served as both implementation and design partner. Edible Brands and Barrel divided the work across design, user experience, branding, and technology, with Edible Brands’ in-house UX and digital experience leads involved throughout the project.
A broader brand refresh accompanied the Shopify build. Large food images, close-up ingredient photography, and a brighter visual system helped the digital experience portray the same freshness customers encounter in the restaurants. Dedicated location pages, menus, and catering content made the site useful for both discovery and brand storytelling.
Work began on January 7, 2026, and the refreshed site launched on April 23, 2026.
Planning for packaged products
Barrel helped Rōti plan for future business as they prepared to move to Shopify. Bottled sauces are a clear opportunity, and the brand is exploring plans to sell them through retail and ecommerce. Shopify gives the team a way to add ecommerce to the existing site without building a separate storefront.
Let’s go ahead and build for that even though we’re not ready for it today.
The results
Updating the storefront at restaurant speed
Marketing and ecommerce specialists can now manage routine updates without putting each change into an engineering queue. Engineers remain focused on more complex back-end logic, including order routing, while the business team keeps the digital storefront up to date.
Direct control matters for a restaurant introducing new menu items, entering new markets, and changing campaigns throughout the year. The site can now reflect what is happening across the business, rather than waiting for custom development.
We’re a fast-casual restaurant. We can’t be slow in how we provide a digital experience, and that’s what we were. Now we can move as fast as our stores, marketing plans, and menu are moving.
A menu, location-page, or campaign update now takes minutes, whereas in the past it could have taken days.
Growing discovery and order value
Since the relaunch, Rōti reports double-digit year-over-year growth in engagement rate, time on site, and events per session. Conversion rate increased 132% year over year, while average order value increased 4%.
The team attributes part of the increase in average order value to the pre-order journey. Shopify gives customers more space to understand the menu, ingredients, imagery, and product options before they enter an ordering system. The ordering platform completes the transaction, while the Shopify experience builds product awareness earlier in the journey.
This is not just an about-us site. This is truly a site that is a peek into the brand experience, the menu and the amazing food.
Supporting growth across markets and channels
Since joining Edible Brands, Rōti has expanded into Atlanta while continuing to operate restaurants in Minnesota, Washington, DC, and Chicago. The Shopify site gives customers in each market a consistent place to explore the menu, find a restaurant, review catering options, and start an order. The company plans to continue growing across the country through franchising.
The next phase includes a loyalty program relaunch designed to better serve both individual and catering customers.
Edible Brands has already adopted Rōti’s delivery technology at Edible Arrangements. Once edible.com moves to Shopify in early Q4, the shared ecommerce team will have a common customer-facing platform across both brands while each keeps the specialized systems their teams need.
Rōti now has a digital storefront that can keep up as the business changes. As the brand enters new markets and develops packaged products, Shopify gives the team one place to evolve the customer experience while their restaurant systems handle ordering and operations.
Simplicity is key, and the simpler you can keep your tech stack, your logic, and your order of operations, the faster your team is going to be able to move.