Greenheart Kitchen has been part of Kingsville since 2011. When Dennis and his team came to us, they wanted three things at once: a fresh design, SEO that actually worked in 2026, and a migration to Shopify so their in-store and online operations could finally live in one system.
They also had a new idea they needed help launching — weekly ready-made meal kits, prepared locally and delivered to people across Kingsville and Essex County. A subscription product is a different kind of trust ask than a one-time purchase, and the old site wasn’t going to carry it.
The Starting Point: A WordPress Site That Had Grown Past Itself
The existing WordPress site had been patched and extended for years. Every new feature was another plugin or workaround stacked on the last one, and performance showed it. Pages took over six seconds to load — a significant barrier for any eCommerce business, and a direct negative signal for local search rankings in Ontario.
The SEO was stuck where it started. No structured data, no JSON-LD, none of the markup that search engines and AI assistants now rely on to understand and surface a local business in Kingsville’s competitive food market.
Behind the counter, things were just as tangled. The in-store POS and the online store ran on separate, competing systems — double entry and regular confusion for staff. The loyalty program was tracked by hand. So were gift cards.
Our Process: Start on the Floor, Not the Screen
We started by driving out to Kingsville and sitting down with Dennis and the staff. Not just the owner. The people running the register every day are the ones who know where a system actually breaks, and their pain points shaped most of our decisions.
Shopify was the clear migration target. It would unify the in-store and online POS out of the box and give the team a single dashboard they could manage without calling us. But the meal kit subscriptions and the loyalty program needed more than stock Shopify features, so we built custom solutions on top of Shopify’s architecture using Hydrogen and their custom app support. Greenheart gets enterprise-grade eCommerce infrastructure underneath, with the custom functionality their business model needs on top.
On design, we could have ported the old look over and called it a day. Instead we treated the rebuild as a chance to keep the warmth of the Greenheart brand while shedding what years of patching had accumulated: inconsistent clip art, dated interfaces, a cart held together with workarounds. The target was charming but premium. People handing over their credit card for a weekly subscription need a site that feels like it will still be there next month.
From there: rounds of revisions with the Greenheart team, several optimization passes, schema and JSON-LD markup for search, and rewritten calls to action tested for conversion before launch.
When the new system was ready, we drove back out to Kingsville and spent a day training the staff in person — answering questions until everyone was comfortable with the new POS, the loyalty dashboard, and the subscription management tools.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Page load time | 6.3 seconds | 1.3 seconds |
| POS systems | 2 (in-store + online, unsynced) | 1 unified Shopify system |
| Loyalty tracking | Manual (spreadsheet) | Automated |
| Gift cards | Manual | Automated |
| Meal kit subscriptions | Not available | Live |
Load time dropped from 6.3 seconds to 1.3 seconds — a 79% improvement and well inside Google’s Core Web Vitals threshold. In-store and online sales now run through a single system. Staff no longer reconcile two competing platforms, and loyalty points and gift cards are handled automatically instead of by hand.
Greenheart launched their meal kit subscription on a platform built to support it, with structured data in place so the business shows up properly in modern search — including AI assistants and Google’s local shopping surfaces.
What We Delivered
- Shopify migration from a legacy WordPress build, including all product data, customer accounts, and order history
- Custom meal kit subscription system built on Shopify’s Hydrogen framework and custom app architecture
- Unified POS connecting in-store and online sales under one dashboard
- Automated loyalty and gift card programs replacing manual tracking
- Custom eCommerce web design — rebuilt from scratch to reflect a premium local brand, not a patched legacy site
- Technical SEO — structured data, JSON-LD, Core Web Vitals optimization, and metadata for local Kingsville and Essex County search
- In-person staff training in Kingsville on launch day
Running a local business in Ontario with old systems and new ambitions? Let’s talk.
