Table of Contents
** Minutes
Finding a sustainable fulfillment solution (and no more packing boxes)
Onboarding with a fulfillment partner, made seamless
Fulfilling millions of dollars in sales without a hitch
Expanding from DTC to new B2B sales channels with ease
Achieving support from a fulfillment partner that feels like part of your team
Having a single source of real-time truth across channels
Leveraging strategic inventory placement to compete with Amazon Prime
Learn how drink mix brand brand Taste Salud leverages ShipBob’s technology, capabilities, and partnership to scale operations and fulfill thousands of orders.
Customer Profile
Taste Salud is an on-the-go drink mix brand that fuses the delicious with the nutritious. Inspired by co-founder and YouTuber Josh Leyva’s love for the authentic tastes of his Mexican heritage and sports nutrition veteran Tyler McCann, Taste Salud’s mixes celebrate unique Latin flavors while promoting 2-in-1 health benefits like hydration and immunity, energy and focus, and calm and sleep. Every serving is vegan and gluten-free, packed with vitamins and minerals, and contains just 1 gram of sugar, so that you can elevate your health goals while enjoying every sip.
Key metrics
- 3 ShipBob fulfillment centers
- 3 years in business
- Over $20M in sales
- 2-person operations team
About Taste Salud
In the summer of 2020, Josh Leyva and Tyler McCann walked into a gym as strangers, and walked out with the beginnings of a business partnership.
As a YouTuber, Josh wanted to share the delicious flavors of aguas frescas with his audience, but was disappointed with the high-sugar products on the market; Tyler was a former athlete, fresh out of 10 years in the sports nutrition industry, and looking for a change.
The two quickly joined forces to create Taste Salud: a drink mix brand that delivers powerful health benefits and nutrients in traditional Mexican flavor profiles. Endeavoring to improve upon existing products, the duo designed each serving to include much less sugar and support specific health benefits, including hydration, energy, and sleep.
They launched their first product in 2021, and in just 3 years, Taste Salud skyrocketed from $0 to over $20M in revenue. The brand now receives thousands of orders every month, sells on multiple retail channels, and continues to release new and delicious flavor varieties.
We sat down with Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud, to discuss how the brand has leveraged ShipBob to scale their order fulfillment seamlessly.
Finding a sustainable fulfillment solution (and no more packing boxes)
As told to ShipBob by Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud.
When we started the business, Josh and I were concerned with developing the product, designing packaging, and bringing it to market. Neither of us has a background in shipping, so we thought to ourselves, “We’ll just ship these units out of our apartment and see what happens. How hard could it be?”
We started with 500 units when we launched in June of 2021, and we sold out of all 500 in a couple hours. It was a fantastic surprise – until we had to fulfill all the orders. I thought it only would take a little while, but that night we spent six or seven hours picking orders and packing boxes. We were up until 1:00 AM packing them.
Right then and there, I knew fulfilling orders ourselves was not sustainable. We needed to find a fulfillment partner, so that when we restocked, we would have someone shipping out orders for us.
“Personally, when I hear about people trying to do their own fulfillment, I’m kind of skeptical. Having gone through that experience of packing orders, I would tell anyone that’s thinking about starting a business that it’s really, really well worth your time to consider partnering with a professional like ShipBob.
A lot of people think, “I don’t need that,” or “I don’t want to waste money on a fulfillment provider.” But in reality, partnering with an expert like ShipBob will free up so much of your time, speed up shipping, and lead to a better customer experience.”
Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud
Onboarding with a fulfillment partner, made seamless
I was considering a couple fulfillment providers, but I noticed that ShipBob ranks really highly among the competition, so I decided to give ShipBob a try. The onboarding process was really, really easy – and that’s coming from someone that didn’t understand shipping at all!
We were assigned an Implementation Specialist, and she helped us with everything: integrating our Shopify store to ShipBob’s dashboard, getting all of our inventory sent and stored in our first ShipBob fulfillment center, and making sure we had what we needed. It was all very seamless.
Now that the business has grown, I’m out of the role where I’m managing fulfillment or connecting with ShipBob’s team day-to-day, but I really appreciate how simple it was to get started with ShipBob.
Fulfilling millions of dollars in sales without a hitch
ShipBob has been an amazing partner, especially as we’ve scaled. We did $350K in sales in our first six months, $4M in sales in 2022, and more than tripled that in 2023 – and throughout all that growth, we’ve had no problem whatsoever keeping up with order fulfillment, even with just two people on our operations team.
This year we’ll do over $20 million in sales, so we’re still growing fast. So, we’re going from $0 to $20M in just a few years and ShipBob is supporting us without a hitch.
ShipBob can handle our order volume because they’re experts at what they do. The last company I worked at had their own warehouse, and I witnessed firsthand how messy and complicated fulfillment can be, especially at scale when it’s not what your company specializes in.
ShipBob’s fulfillment centers are nothing like that. I’ve been to multiple ShipBob locations, and I’ve seen how much they’ve invested into automation and how organized everything is. It’s no wonder that orders get out within 24 hours of being received – ShipBob is really good at what they do.
“We’ve scaled so much, and there have been zero hiccups in fulfillment with ShipBob. I don’t think even as we keep scaling in the years to come that there will be any hiccups there. That cannot always be said of brands that run their own warehouse.
Running your own warehouse, you have to go out and hire very experienced people, invest in equipment, build in automation – and often, you’re wasting a lot of time, energy, resources, and human capital for a sub-par result. Why do that when a partner like ShipBob exists, and makes fulfillment so easy at a fair price?”
Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud
Expanding from DTC to new B2B sales channels with ease
Selling through multiple channels was key to scaling as fast as we have, and ShipBob’s expertise makes it much easier and less stressful.
For instance, we got a DM from Walmart around six months in, and the subsequent meeting went really well. Walmart wanted to partner with us, and we reached out to ShipBob to find out if they could handle it. Immediately, ShipBob assigned multiple people from the B2B side onto our account. It was really reassuring that ShipBob had all the capabilities and setup to ensure that there were no delays, and we could just jump right into that new channel.
“As we’ve added more B2B channels – like Walmart, Target, and Amazon – shipping has never been an area of concern, because we have ShipBob supporting us.”
Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud
We now fulfill our Target orders through ShipBob, and also leverage ShipBob’s FBA Prep solution to help us fulfill Amazon orders. Sometimes we’ll ship directly from our manufacturers, but when inventory ebbs and flows, we’re definitely leaning on ShipBob to handle replenishment. We feel totally comfortable using ShipBob when we need to for Amazon, and I feel very confident in all things Amazon when it comes to ShipBob.
Achieving support from a fulfillment partner that feels like part of your team
As our company grew, we were assigned a truly phenomenal ShipBob Merchant Success Manager. We love her – we have weekly calls with her, and she really does feel like a part of our team.
When you’re scaling pretty fast, snags are bound to come up, and we have the ability to call her anytime if there are issues. She’s always been super helpful for us, and we feel like when we reach out to her, she’s doing everything she can to make sure we get quick answers and things get taken care of.
Having a single source of real-time truth across channels
We used NetSuite at the last company I worked at, and it was super complex. There were multiple staff members that were just assigned to operate NetSuite. Now, at our company, we haven’t had to get any outside third-party or supply chain software.
“Because we’ve been able to utilize ShipBob to fulfill all of our orders as a mini-ERP – including integrating directly to Amazon, multiple B2B channels, and our Shopify store – everything is so streamlined.”
Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud
In addition to ShipBob’s App Store and integrations, the ShipBob dashboard is great for real-time information with their built-in reporting. It’s one of the things that really separates ShipBob from the rest of the solutions on the market.
I’ve oftentimes leveraged the data and analytics ShipBob provides when I’m preparing for sales meetings. I can see what our top selling states are, what our average fulfillment time and cost is, how much inventory we have on hand at each fulfillment center – a lot of different metrics that are very helpful when you’re selling B2B. ShipBob has all of that information ready for us at any time.
Leveraging strategic inventory placement to compete with Amazon Prime
In the first couple years of our business, our products were constantly going in and out of stock because of how quickly the brand was growing and how high demand was. We wanted to make sure we could get good inventory levels at each location, so we joined ShipBob’s Inventory Placement Program to improve inventory allocation and distribution across the US.
IPP has been a game changer for us. First, it reduces costs for us, because we’re shipping more orders a much shorter distance. Second, and maybe equally as important, it’s reducing the time that customers have to wait to get packages.
“Reducing lead times through ShipBob’s strategic inventory distribution is super important, because we are basically competing against Amazon. We want our website to be the go-to purchasing platform for customers, and we don’t want shipping to be a reason why somebody might not make that choice.
By distributing inventory across 3 ShipBob fulfillment centers through their Inventory Placement Program, our customers are getting their orders in a couple days. It’s very comparable to what customers been trained to expect with Amazon.”
Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud
And we’re still not even leveraging ShipBob’s network to its fullest extent. We’re currently in 3 ShipBob fulfillment centers, but we’ll probably add a couple more in the years to come. That will enable us to keep cutting shipping times and lowering shipping costs, which is key to continued growth.
The other great thing about IPP is that it makes inventory allocation so much easier. Trying to figure out how much of what inventory to send where could be wildly complex for our supply chain managers – but since ShipBob automatically tracks our order and shipping data for us, that data basically tells us our optimal inventory distribution.
We also get automatic reminders notifying us well before inventory levels are getting depleted, so we don’t have to constantly be checking our stock levels. IPP has saved our supply chain team a lot of extra work, and they also feel really supported by ShipBob and know that they can turn to them for help.
What’s next for Taste Salud
Our goal is to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We’re developing new products, creating new flavors, expanding into new channels – we’re definitely continuing to grow at a fast pace!
One of our highest priorities is expanding our retail footprint. Right now we’re in Target and Walmart, but we’re also looking to get into convenience stores and clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club. When we get opportunities like those, our focus is on delivering results, selling well, and being good partners to them, because once we prove ourselves on these kinds of platforms, there’s no telling where else we could grow.
We want to grow our business aggressively but sustainably, so I’m definitely happy I found ShipBob when I did. We feel great about the partnership, and we haven’t looked back or felt the need to look anywhere else. We’re just looking forward to the future, and to scaling even higher with ShipBob.
Taste Salud’s team at ShipBob
Deborah Carr
Deborah is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supportsTaste Salud.
Casey Armstrong
Casey is the CMO of ShipBob, and serves as the Executive Sponsor for Taste Salud.
Get started with ShipBob
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