Food & Beverage
Indexed performance data for Food & Beverages brands on Shopify: conversion rate, AOV, free shipping behavior, and shipping revenue, tracked against a consistent baseline month over month.
Part of the PDQ Checkout Benchmarks: 130M+ checkout sessions across 500+ Shopify merchants, indexed to June 2024 = 1.0x.
Food & Beverages Checkout Performance Index: May 2026
An index of 1.15x means that metric is 15% above baseline. 0.92x means it's 8% below. We publish relative change rather than absolute numbers because absolute rates vary too much by merchant size and category to be meaningful as cross-merchant benchmarks.
June 2026: Food & Beverages Checkout Insights
Three signals worth acting on this month
Written for Food & Beverages operators. Every observation connects to a decision you can make this week.
Food & Beverages AOV reached 1.26x in May, its strongest reading since the December 2024 peak
Food & Beverages AOV has been building steadily since February's 1.09x low: 1.19x in March, 1.22x in April, 1.26x in May. Three consecutive months of AOV growth is the clearest trend line the vertical has produced in 2026, and May's reading is the highest since December 2024's 1.28x peak. ARPC followed at 1.27x, also its strongest reading in five months. The spring demand cycle in this vertical is delivering.
The driver is buyer mix. May concentrates a specific type of Food & Beverages purchaser: grilling season build-up, specialty food gifting for Mother's Day and Memorial Day, subscription reactivation for outdoor entertaining, and new product launches timed to warm-weather consumption. These are higher-intent, higher-basket buyers than the replenishment-focused buyers who dominate Q1. They're not restocking. They're building for a season, and the checkout experiences that capture their intent -- bundle pricing, multi-unit savings framing, subscription commitment prompts -- are the ones generating the AOV lift.
What to do: If your Food & Beverages AOV tracked below the vertical's 1.26x in May while conversion was roughly in line, look at your bundle and subscription mechanics at checkout. The buyers in this vertical in May are primed for larger orders. A "buy a case, save 15%" prompt or a subscription offer that surfaces per-unit savings at the moment of purchase is doing the work that a discount code won't do in this category. The buyer is already spending more. The checkout just needs to frame the next increment.
Coupon usage fell to 0.35x in May, continuing the most consistently below-baseline series in the dataset
Food & Beverages coupon usage has been running below 0.50x baseline for most of the past year, and May's reading of 0.35x confirms that the category's structural detachment from code-based purchasing is not changing. The small uptick to 0.37x in April -- likely driven by Earth Day and spring promotional activity -- reversed in May. The vertical is back near its floor.
What makes May's reading notable is the contrast with Apparel, which spiked to 0.99x on Memorial Day promotions in the same month. Both categories participate in the Memorial Day promotional calendar, but their buyer responses to code mechanics are completely different. Apparel buyers hunt for codes. Food & Beverages buyers don't. A Memorial Day promotion in this vertical converts through free shipping, bundle pricing, or a gift-with-purchase offer far more effectively than a percentage-off code.
What to do: If you ran a Memorial Day promotion in May and saw minimal coupon redemption despite meaningful traffic, that's not a campaign failure. It's a category signal. Your buyers are not arriving via code-aggregator channels and they're not conditioned to expect a discount before completing. Redirect your summer promotional budget toward the mechanics that move this buyer: subscription introductory offers, bundle savings at checkout, and free shipping thresholds set to stretch the basket for the season's high-AOV buyers.
Conversion held at 1.00x for the second consecutive month. The vertical has stabilized after March's anomaly.
Food & Beverages conversion has now posted 1.00x in both April and May, recovering fully from March's 0.97x -- the only below-baseline reading the vertical had produced in twenty-two months. Two months at exactly baseline isn't the outperformance this category is capable of: the vertical ran between 1.01x and 1.10x for most of 2024 and 2025. But it confirms the March dip was a traffic-mix anomaly, not the start of a structural decline.
The gap between the vertical's historical conversion range and its current 1.00x reading is worth examining for May. AOV at 1.26x and ARPC at 1.27x are strong, which means the buyers who are completing are spending well. The question is whether a higher-intent buyer mix in May -- grilling season, gifting -- should be producing conversion above baseline rather than at it. If your own conversion held flat in May despite stronger seasonal demand, the friction may be sitting at the shipping reveal or delivery date step, where Food & Beverages buyers are most sensitive to uncertainty.
What to do: Pull your May checkout funnel by step and compare drop-off rates against February, when this vertical was posting 1.01x conversion. If drop-off at shipping reveal increased, your threshold may be set above where the May buyer mix is landing. If drop-off at the final payment step increased, delivery date specificity or freshness guarantees may be missing. In Food & Beverages, a buyer who was planning to spend $75 on specialty items for a Memorial Day gathering will not complete if the delivery window is vague. Specific dates convert. Ranges don't.
How does your Food & Beverages store's checkout compare?
Checkout Index tells you where your store sits inside this vertical: personalized Health Score, shipping signal analysis, and a revenue impact estimate based on your actual checkout behavior.
Archive
Monthly archive: Food & Beverages
Every monthly dispatch, indexed and preserved. Use the archive to track how Food & Beverages checkout behavior has shifted over time, to validate whether seasonal patterns in your own data match the vertical.
June 2026 {{latest}}
AOV at 1.26x, strongest reading since December 2024; conversion holds at 1.00x for second consecutive month; coupon usage falls back to 0.35x after April uptick.
CVR recovers to 1.00x after March's first below-baseline reading; AOV jumps to 1.22x, highest since December 2024; coupon usage edges up to 0.37x but remains near dataset low.
Conversion dips below baseline for first time at 0.97x; shipping revenue recovers to 1.34x; coupon usage hits series low at 0.32x.
Data begins June 2024 (baseline). Earlier dispatches available on request.
Methodology
About this dataset
The Food & Beverages dataset within the PDQ Checkout Benchmarks draws from aggregated, anonymized session data across food and beverage-categorized merchants on Shopify's platform. Merchants are classified using Shopify's standard industry taxonomy and must meet a minimum session threshold for inclusion. The Food & Beverages cohort spans packaged food, beverages, supplements, specialty grocery, and direct-to-consumer meal and snack brands.
All figures are indexed to June 2024 = 1.0x. Figures exclude bot traffic, draft orders, and point-of-sale transactions. Data refreshes monthly, typically in the first week, reflecting the prior month's activity. Absolute conversion rates are not published; all metrics represent relative indexed change against the baseline cohort.
To compare your store's actual performance against this vertical, use Checkout Index.
