Australian Native Food Co | Native Food Ecommerce & Wholesale PWA

JABA is proud to unveil the ecommerce Progressive Web App for Australian Native Food Co, a South Australian producer selling native food, body care and home fragrance to the public, to wholesale stockists and through fundraising partners, all from one platform.

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Project Snapshot

• Client: Australian Native Food Co
• Industry: Food and Beverage, Retail and Wholesale
• Location: South Australia
• Services Delivered: Ecommerce PWA Development, Custom Wholesale Platform, Content and SEO Strategy
• Scale: More than 40 unique products across four categories, stocked by over 180 Australian retailers
• Standout Feature: A custom wholesale backend where approved stockists order at trade pricing

The Problem

Australian Native Food Co is not a single business with a single audience. It sells jams, marmalades, relishes, dukkahs, native herbs, wild harvested teas, body care and soy candles direct to the public. It supplies more than 180 stockists around the country at trade pricing. It runs fundraising programs for schools, clubs and community organisations, delivers corporate gifting, and hosts tasting and cooking experiences at its own manufacturing plant.

A standard online store handles the first of those and none of the rest. Wholesale in particular does not fit a retail checkout, because stockists have to be vetted and approved, then see different pricing to the general public, then reorder without a phone call or an emailed order form every time. Handling that manually costs the team hours every week and gets slower as the stockist list grows.

There was a second problem, and it is the one unique to native food. Karkalla, Kakadu plum, wattleseed, bunya nuts, Davidson plum and lemon myrtle are unfamiliar to most Australian shoppers, so a product page alone rarely closes a sale. People need to know what an ingredient tastes like and what to do with it before they will put it in a cart.

What JABA Built

JABA delivered a full ecommerce Progressive Web App built on its bespoke CMSv7, giving Australian Native Food Co app-like speed on any device, installation straight to a customer's home screen without an app store, and a store the team manages itself. The catalogue is organised into New Products, Body, Pantry and Aromas with a live category filter across gift packs, jams and marmalades, dukkahs, relishes and verjuice, native herbs, fruit powders, epsom salts, reed diffusers, soy candles and wild harvested teas, and checkout runs on Stripe with Afterpay available.

Alongside the shop sits everything the brand needs to sell an unfamiliar product category. Recipes, experiences, corporate gifting, fundraising, a stockist directory, awards, gallery, FAQ, careers, corporate partners and the company's Who Do We Support pillars all live in the same platform, so the story and the shop are never separate systems. Enquiry-only lines sit in the same catalogue as purchasable ones, which lets the business list its full range without forcing everything through a checkout.

Behind the storefront, JABA built a custom wholesale platform: a vetted application process, approved trade accounts, wholesale pricing and a dedicated Wholesale Dashboard, all sharing the same product catalogue as the public shop rather than duplicating it.

What Was Technically Interesting

The wholesale build was the real engineering. A prospective stockist registers interest through the site, the Australian Native Food Co team reviews and approves the application, and the applicant is emailed a signup link to create their trade account. From then on they log into the Wholesale Dashboard and order at their own pricing, whenever they like. One catalogue, two commercial models, two entirely different sets of pricing and permissions, and no manual order forms in the middle.

Fundraising works as its own signup pipeline rather than a page of text. Organisations choose between group fundraising, where a school or club pools its effort towards shared prizes, and top fundraiser prize models, where individuals compete, or work with the team on a custom arrangement, and register through the site with supporting marketing material provided.

The content engine is where SEO and ecommerce meet. JABA developed a blog and recipe strategy in which every recipe is built around products the company actually sells, and each ingredient in the method links directly to its product page. A reader who arrives searching for what to do with karkalla relish or wattleseed lands on a recipe, not a sales pitch, and is one click from the jar. It builds internal linking depth across the whole catalogue, gives the brand a reason to publish regularly, and turns an education problem into a traffic channel.

Business Outcome

Australian Native Food Co now runs retail, wholesale, fundraising, corporate gifting and experiences from a single platform, instead of stitching together a shop, a spreadsheet and an inbox. Stockists order themselves at the right price, fundraising groups sign up without a phone call, and the team spends its time on product and partnerships rather than processing orders.

The recipe strategy keeps producing new indexable content built around the products, so the catalogue gets deeper internal linking and customers get a genuine reason to come back between purchases. Every recipe published is another entry point to a product page.

The platform also carries the part of the business that is not transactional. Awards, corporate partners, the Zoos SA conservation partnership and the company's community, education and grower commitments all sit alongside the shop, so a customer buying a jar of Wild Rosella jam can see exactly where their money goes.

Why JABA Was Chosen

This project needed more than a store template. Custom wholesale logic, a fundraising signup pipeline, an ecommerce catalogue with mixed purchase models and a content strategy that feeds the shop are four different disciplines, and handing them to four different suppliers is how projects like this stall.

JABA builds on its own CMSv7 and PWA technology, which means custom functionality is a development decision rather than a hunt for a plugin that almost fits. More than 26 years as a South Australian digital team sits behind that, along with the local relationship that lets an Adelaide producer pick up the phone and talk to the people who actually built the platform.

The relationship also did not end at launch. The recipe and blog strategy is ongoing work, which keeps the site growing with the business rather than ageing from the day it went live.

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Like What You See?

This is the kind of platform JABA builds for businesses that sell to more than one kind of customer. If you need an online store with wholesale pricing, trade accounts, custom ordering or a content strategy that actually drives product sales, we would love to help. Get a free quote for your website today.