Custom Jekyll site and brand identity for a premium D2C home-cooked food service — weekly rotating menus, data-driven content, and a Shopify commerce layer.
The founder of BE.NOURISHED needed a brand presence that matched the premium positioning of the product — freshly batch-cooked meals available for collection Friday evening and Saturday morning in Belfast. Most D2C food brands either look cheap or default to generic Shopify themes. The site needed to communicate luxury, warmth, and trust while making the weekly menu and ordering process frictionless.
Custom Jekyll static site built entirely to the NOURISH brand specification. SCSS design tokens capture the full brand palette — sage, cream, clay, gold, warm charcoal — with Cormorant Garamond and Jost typography loaded from Google Fonts. The weekly menu is entirely data-driven: a single `_data/menus.yml` file powers the menu page via Liquid templates, meaning a new week's menu is published by editing one file with no template changes required. The site acts as the marketing and content layer; commerce (subscriptions, checkout, account management) routes through Shopify via linked CTAs. Jekyll's plugin ecosystem handles SEO automatically: `jekyll-seo-tag` provides OG tags and Twitter cards, `jekyll-sitemap` generates the sitemap, and schema.org structured data (Organization, Recipe, Article) is embedded per page type.
A fast, premium D2C brand site that genuinely reflects the brand's positioning — luxury nourishing convenience — without the overhead of a CMS or framework. The weekly menu rotates with a single YAML edit. The site is ready to scale into blog and recipe content as the brand grows, with Shopify handling orders and a planned Spring Boot service for kitchen production tooling.
"I came to Samuel with a brand, a product, and a very clear idea of what I didn't want — another generic food delivery template that looked like every other meal kit site on the market. What he delivered was the opposite: a site that genuinely feels as premium and considered as the food we cook. He got the brand immediately, pushed back constructively on a couple of decisions that would have hurt the user experience, and built a menu system that lets me publish a new week's menu in minutes without touching a single line of code. The quality of the engineering is invisible in the best possible way — everything just works, it loads instantly, and it looks exactly right. Samuel was a pleasure to work with throughout, and the site launched faster than I thought possible. I wouldn't hesitate to bring him back for the next phase."
BE.NOURISHED — Freelance — Premium D2C Food Brand WebsiteBE.NOURISHED is a premium D2C food service offering home-cooked-feeling meals for collection at the weekend — designed for busy professionals and families who want to eat well without spending their Saturday cooking. The brief was to build a site that matched the ambition of the product: premium, warm, and editorially considered.
The D2C food market is polarised. At the low end: functional but generic Shopify storefronts. At the high end: expensive agency builds that take months and cost tens of thousands. BE.NOURISHED needed a third path — a bespoke, brand-true site delivered quickly and maintainable without a developer on retainer.
The weekly menu rotation was the core content problem. Menus change every week, dishes have detailed prep instructions and wellness notes, and allergen information must be accurate. Any solution that required template edits to publish a new week would be too fragile to rely on.
Design system from scratch. All brand tokens — the full sage, cream, clay, mist, and gold palette plus typography — live in a single _tokens.scss file. Every component references these tokens; no raw hex values appear in component stylesheets. Light/dark section treatment is a class toggle on a wrapper div.
Data-driven menu system. The entire menu lives in _data/menus.yml. Each week is a structured YAML entry: theme, tagline, mains, bowls, and add-ons, each with name, description, wellness note, prep instructions, allergen list, and reheating method. The Liquid template reads this file and renders the full menu page — week switcher, dish cards, prep modals — without any template changes between weeks. Publishing week 18 means writing the YAML for week 18.
Shopify integration layer. BE.NOURISHED uses Shopify for subscriptions, checkout, and customer accounts. The Jekyll site’s “Order now” CTAs link directly to Shopify checkout URLs. The two systems are deliberately decoupled: the Jekyll site is the brand and content layer, Shopify is the commerce layer. This keeps the content site fast and simple while using Shopify’s battle-tested subscription infrastructure.
SEO built in. jekyll-seo-tag handles OG tags, Twitter cards, and canonical URLs automatically from page front matter. jekyll-sitemap generates sitemap.xml on every build. Recipe pages carry schema.org/Recipe structured data for Google rich snippets. Blog posts carry schema.org/Article. The contact page carries schema.org/LocalBusiness with collection slot hours.
Progressive enhancement. All pages render and navigate correctly without JavaScript. JS layers on the week-switcher (toggling between current and previous menus) and prep modals (expanding allergen and reheating details), both of which are non-critical paths.
The architecture anticipates two additional phases: a blog and recipe collection (Jekyll _posts and _recipes collections, already scaffolded) and a Spring Boot production dashboard that reads Shopify orders via the API to aggregate ingredient quantities and generate kitchen prep sheets and collection schedules — removing the last remaining manual step from the fulfilment process.