Promotions, brand websites and online stores for food and beverage

A code under the cap or on the pack is the quickest route: scan, enter it and know straight away whether you've won. If the packaging can't be changed, the till receipt becomes the proof of purchase. Either way, every entry has to be checked, and at volume that can't be done by hand.

For Bar-le-Duc there was a campaign code under the cap of more than 1.5 million bottles in supermarkets. Consumers enter the code on the site and see straight away whether they have won. The promotion brought in tens of thousands of entries, and for a large share of those participants it was their first visit to the website. For Verkade we built a promotion platform where AI checks the till receipts and the team follows the promotion in its own dashboard.

We later rebuilt Bar-le-Duc's promotion system into a platform where every promotion is a configuration, such as the music competition Bar-4-Bar. The next promotion then needs a new set-up, not a new system.

If a brand sells through supermarkets, hospitality or festivals, the purpose of the site changes. Not ordering, but building preference for the brand and sending people to the shelf or the bar. So we start with where the buyer comes across the product.

For Bar-le-Duc we built, together with Crocodile Agency for brand and creative, a brand website with a 3D product experience, a festival calendar and a stockist finder that shows the nearest point of sale by postcode. For Lavish, a brand of ready-to-drink cocktails, we built a multilingual brand website with a page for each cocktail and a location finder that shows where Lavish is available, from festivals to bars and shops.

Distributors, venues and event organisers want to know what's available before they make an enquiry. If that information only lives in the ERP, it turns into emailing and phoning. An integration pulls in stock per product, so the site shows what is actually available without anyone keeping it up to date.

At Lavish that runs through an integration with their ERP, Byte24. The site shows stock per product without selling online, and a separate landing page for distributors, event organisers and hospitality makes a trade enquiry the logical next step. With a different ERP it works the same way: we can connect any system.

Once those enquiries come in, an AI employee can prepare the follow-up: read the request, ask for missing details and get the lead ready for sales.

If you sell online yourself, the big days revolve around promotions: a new flavour, a discount or a launch. Traffic then arrives in short peaks. We choose the platform for that day, not for an average week.

For sports nutrition brand Kosso Nutrition we built an online store on Shopify Plus, with its own design and a migration of products, customer data and more than a hundred blog articles, keeping the URL structure. The first big promotion day after launch brought 100,000 visitors, with 10,500 orders and an 11.9% conversion rate in a single day. Under that load the store stayed stable, with no downtime.

Shopify Plus absorbs peak load as part of the platform and gives access to a customisable checkout, including upsells. If a standard Shopify plan is enough, we'll tell you that too.

A promotion or online store collects personal data: names, email addresses, sometimes a date of birth or a photo of a till receipt. The less you ask for, the less you have to protect. So before we build, we agree which data is needed, who sees it, where it is stored and how long it is kept.

At Verkade, full control over personal data was one of the reasons not to use a standard promotion tool. The promotion runs on its own infrastructure, uploads are stored securely and the team exports the entry data itself for follow-up. Your Tech Club is ISO 27001 certified. That certification covers how we work as an organisation; what a promotion needs beyond that, we decide for each platform.