Food and Beverage Ecommerce Benchmarks (2026): Repeat Purchase Rate, CLV and Loyalty

Short answer: Food and beverage stores have the highest repeat purchase rates on Shopify. The median non-alcoholic beverage store had a 12-month repeat purchase rate of 32.2% and the median coffee and tea store 31.7% across 1,326 Shopify stores in By the Numbers' benchmark, against 18.1% for all stores. Revenue tells the same story: over BFCM 2025, repeat buyers drove 70.2% of food and beverage GMV in Klaviyo's industry benchmarks, the highest share of any vertical it measured. Within the category, how fast the product runs out explains most of the gap between drinks, coffee, specialty food and wine.

Key figures at a glance

Replenishment velocity sets the ceiling

The repeat purchase rate says whether a customer came back within the year. Velocity says how soon. By the Numbers also follows new customers from their first order. In its second-order data, 10.1% of new non-alcoholic beverage customers had ordered again within 30 days, 18.8% within 90 days and 29.3% within 365 days. For the median store across all categories the figures were 6.6%, 11.4% and 19.5%.

The shape of the curve barely changes between categories. Divide each row's 30-day and 90-day rates by its 365-day rate: drinks, coffee, specialty food and the all-store median each land 30% to 34% of the year's second orders in the first month and 58% to 64% by day 90. Food and beverage does not win on timing. It wins on height. A drinks store turns about 1.5 times as many new customers into second-order customers in the first 30 days as the median store, and about 1.6 times as many by day 90.

That has a practical consequence. Most of the second orders a food or drinks brand will ever get arrive within one or two pack cycles. A customer who has not reordered by the time the pack should be empty has usually bought something else.

Subscription data shows where that clock sits for coffee. Across more than 20,000 subscription brands in Recharge's cadence data, the median coffee and tea subscription reorders every 30 days, and 53.2% of reorders land within two days of the 30-day mark.

A scorecard: four tiers for each subcategory

Source: By the Numbers, 12-month repeat purchase rate, 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles. Store counts: 38 non-alcoholic beverage, 31 coffee and tea and 45 artisan and specialty food stores.

Three things stand out in the scorecard.

Coffee has the widest spread. About 20 points separate the 25th and 75th percentile coffee stores, against about 13 for drinks. A roaster selling beans on a cycle and a coffee shop selling gear and gifts share a category label, not a business model. Before you compare yourself with the coffee median, check how much of your revenue is beans.

Specialty food sits a full tier lower. The top-quarter line for artisan and specialty food (27.9%) is below the drinks median. Treats and gifts are bought for occasions, not to replace something that ran out.

Some subcategories have no Shopify benchmark yet. Alcoholic beverages, convenience and snacks, sweets, groceries, baked goods and meal delivery are all listed by By the Numbers as having too few stores to report. Snack and confectionery brands should use the specialty food row. Wine needs different metrics altogether, covered below.

Four subcategories, four retention problems

Coffee: easy to start, steady to leak

In Recharge's cohort data from July 2025 to June 2026, 99.3% of new coffee and tea subscribers reached their first reorder, but only 9.3% reached the sixth and 1.3% the twelfth. Across renewal cycles in the same period, 20.7% of coffee and tea renewals ended in an active cancellation and only 4.0% were skipped, according to the same Recharge analysis. Coffee subscribers who have had enough cancel rather than pause. Make skipping and changing the roast easier to find than the cancel button.

Public filings show what that leak does to a large subscription base. BRC's 2025 annual report says its Coffee Club served approximately 159,900 active subscribers at the end of 2025. A year earlier, its 2024 annual report put the figure at approximately 190,400. That is a fall of about 16% in a year. A coffee subscription programme needs a steady flow of new subscribers just to stand still, so the one-time reorder still matters.

Drinks and functional beverages: the fastest second order

Non-alcoholic beverages had both the highest 12-month repeat purchase rate and the highest 30-day second-order rate of any category in By the Numbers' table. Drinks are heavy, used daily and easy to run out of.

The risk is boredom. In Recharge's electrolyte category data, brands running electrolyte subscriptions grew 30% and subscription revenue grew 37%, but new subscriber sign-ups stayed roughly flat. Recharge also finds that 90% of churn in the category is voluntary, with flavour fatigue tending to hit around order three. Offer a new flavour or a mixed pack before the third order ships, not after the cancellation.

Snacks and specialty food: gifting distorts the curve

Artisan and specialty food stores sit above the all-store median in By the Numbers' data but a full tier below drinks and coffee. Recharge left food out of its reorder comparison because the food curve's 12th reorder reads higher than its 9th, which Recharge calls the fingerprint of gifting and one-time orders.

Food subscriptions also lose the most people early. In Recharge's renewal data, 28.2% of food and beverage renewals at the first renewal (cycles two and three) ended in active churn, the highest of any vertical, falling to 6.4% from the sixth cycle on. Snacks and confectionery held steady at roughly 7% of subscription GMV across Recharge's food, supplement and wellness brands, and processed 69.4% of scheduled renewals.

Two fixes follow. Tag gift orders and report them apart, or a strong gifting season will make your repeat rate look worse than it is. And send a gift recipient an acquisition offer, not a reorder reminder meant for the buyer.

Wine and spirits: a club business, not a replenishment business

There is no Shopify repeat purchase benchmark for alcohol; By the Numbers lists alcoholic beverages among the categories with too few stores. The best data on direct-to-consumer wine comes from shipping records.

The DtC wine channel shrank by 967,000 cases and more than $230 million in 2025, a 15% drop in volume and a 6% drop in value, while the average price per bottle rose 11%, according to the 2026 report from Sovos ShipCompliant and WineBusiness Analytics. The average DtC shipment in the first half of 2025 carried 9.9 bottles, in Sovos's mid-year report. Wine buyers are buying fewer, larger and more expensive shipments.

A shipment of nearly ten bottles is months of supply, so the replenishment clock runs in quarters, not weeks. Wineries hold customers through clubs instead. Direct-to-consumer sales made up slightly more than 70% of revenue for the producers in SVB's 2026 direct-to-consumer survey, which also found club acquisition and attrition closely aligned, so new sign-ups are often offset by cancellations. At Crimson Wine Group, direct sales to consumers represented 41% of net sales in 2025. For a wine brand, track club retention, shipments per member and the share of members who buy outside their club allocation. A 12-month repeat purchase rate means little when the core customer receives four shipments a year by default.

Why 30% of customers can produce 70% of revenue

Food and beverage founders see figures that look contradictory: about a third of customers repeat, yet most revenue comes from repeat buyers. They measure different things.

Source: By the Numbers repeat purchase rate and customer retention rate benchmarks; Klaviyo BFCM benchmarks; Recharge.

Here is how the first and fourth rows fit together. Take a coffee store at the median with 10,000 customers in a year: 3,170 order more than once. If those repeaters average four orders, they place 12,680 orders against 6,830 single orders, so 32% of customers produce 65% of orders. Then add last year's customers who order once this year. They are repeat buyers in a revenue split but not in a 12-month repeat rate, and they push the repeat share past 70%.

So a 70% repeat share is a measure of dependence, not of loyalty. A store with a high repeat share and a falling second-order rate is living off customers it won in earlier years. Public filings show the same concentration: Laird Superfood's 2025 annual report says over 80% of its DTC net sales came from either subscribers or repeat users in both 2025 and 2024.

The gap between the first two rows matters too. Coffee and drinks stores' 12-month repeat rates run six to seven points above their annual retention. Some customers reorder in bursts within a year and do not carry into the next. If your gap is much wider, look at what happens after the third or fourth order.

Worked example: a coffee roaster with 10,000 customers

Assume a roaster with 10,000 customers in the last 12 months and a $45 average order. That is well below the food and beverage median of $85 per order in Littledata's benchmark, which includes wine, grocery and gift baskets; use your own number.

Moving up one tier. At the coffee and tea median of 31.7%, 3,170 customers order more than once. At the top-quarter line of 41.6%, 4,160 do. The extra 990 repeat customers place at least one more order each: at least $44,550 a year in revenue before any third or fourth orders.

What a new subscriber is worth against a one-time buyer. Filling the gaps in Recharge's coffee and tea curve between the published points (a geometric interpolation, our estimate) gives about 2.7 reorders in a subscriber's first 12 months. With the first order, that is roughly 3.7 shipments, or about $166 at $45. At the coffee median, 27.1% of new one-time customers order a second time within a year, so the average new one-time buyer places a little under 1.3 orders in year one if few go on to a third. On those numbers a new subscriber is worth about 2.9 one-time customers in year one. That sits close to Recharge's estimate that a single subscriber is worth over three non-subscribing customers to a food and beverage brand.

The lesson for the roaster. Converting 300 more first-time buyers to subscription adds roughly 720 shipments in year one on the curve above, compared with leaving them as one-time buyers. But the curve also says almost all of them will be gone within a year, so the subscription has to be paired with a strong one-time reorder path for people who cancel.

Timing and channel: where the reorder prompt pays

Automated messages timed to the customer's own behaviour beat broadcast campaigns by a wide margin in this category. In Klaviyo's 2026 email benchmarks, food and beverage flows had a placed-order rate of 2.46% against 0.26% for campaigns, both above the all-industry averages of 2.11% and 0.16%. On SMS, Klaviyo's benchmarks show food and beverage flows earning $1.83 per recipient against $0.34 for campaigns.

Per 10,000 recipients, those email rates mean roughly 246 orders from a flow against 26 from a campaign. The reorder reminder is the flow that matters most for a consumable. Time it a few days before the pack runs out, set by pack size rather than a fixed 30 days, and stop it the moment the customer orders.

The Shopify Retention Email Framework sets out the 11 lifecycle emails that drive repeat purchases, including the replenishment reminder and the win-back that should follow when the run-out date passes without an order.

Measuring it in Shopify, like for like

• Use the same definition as the benchmark. By the Numbers counts customers, not orders: the share of customers in a fixed 12-month window who ordered at least twice. Shopify's returning customer rate is defined differently, so do not compare it with the tiers above.
• Separate subscription renewals. Recurring subscription orders appear as ordinary Shopify orders. A store with many subscribers will show a high repeat rate mechanically. Report the one-time repeat rate and subscriber retention by reorder separately.
• Split by product type. Beans and gear, single cans and variety packs, self-purchase and gifts behave differently. Tag gift orders at checkout.
• Track the second-order rate by monthly cohort at 30, 90 and 365 days. It moves months before the 12-month rate does and tells you whether this quarter's new customers are as good as last year's.
• Wine and spirits: measure club retention, shipments per member and off-allocation purchases instead of comparing with consumable benchmarks.

Where Mage fits

Mage is a Shopify loyalty app. Its food and beverage loyalty program is built around the levers above: reorder multipliers that reward a repeat order within the product's cycle, bonus points for moving to a subscription through Recharge or Skio, and earning at Shopify POS and from retail receipts for brands that also sell in stores and at markets. Wine brands can use VIP tiers to give club-style status to customers who buy outside a club. Tea Drops runs its loyalty programme on Mage.