How Taste Salud Scaled from $0 to Over $20M in Sales by Outsourcing Fulfilment to ShipBob [Case Study]

Learn how drink mix brand brand Taste Salud leverages ShipBob’s technology, capabilities, and partnership to scale operations and fulfil thousands of orders.

Key metrics

• 3 ShipBob fulfilment centres    
• 3 years in business  
• Over $20M in sales  
• 2-person operations team   

About Taste Salud

In the summer of 2020, Josh Leyva and Tyler McCann walked into a gym as strangers, and walked out with the beginnings of a business partnership.  

As a YouTuber, Josh wanted to share the delicious flavours of aguas frescas with his audience, but was disappointed with the high-sugar products on the market; Tyler was a former athlete, fresh out of 10 years in the sports nutrition industry, and looking for a change.  

The two quickly joined forces to create Taste Salud: a drink mix brand that delivers powerful health benefits and nutrients in traditional Mexican flavour profiles. Endeavoring to improve upon existing products, the duo designed each serving to include much less sugar and support specific health benefits, including hydration, energy, and sleep.  

They launched their first product in 2021, and in just 3 years, Taste Salud skyrocketed from $0 to over $20M in revenue. The brand now receives thousands of orders every month, sells on multiple retail channels, and continues to release new and delicious flavour varieties.  

We sat down with Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud, to discuss how the brand has leveraged ShipBob to scale their order fulfilment seamlessly.   

Right then and there, I knew fulfilling orders ourselves was not sustainable. We needed to find a fulfilment partner, so that when we restocked, we would have someone shipping out orders for us.  

“Personally, when I hear about people trying to do their own fulfilment, I’m kind of skeptical. Having gone through that experience of packing orders, I would tell anyone that’s thinking about starting a business that it’s really, really well worth your time to consider partnering with a professional like ShipBob.  

A lot of people think, “I don’t need that,” or “I don’t want to waste money on a fulfilment provider.” But in reality, partnering with an expert like ShipBob will free up so much of your time, speed up shipping, and lead to a better customer experience.”  

Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud 

Onboarding with a fulfilment partner, made seamless 

I was considering a couple fulfilment providers, but I noticed that ShipBob ranks really highly among the competition, so I decided to give ShipBob a try. The onboarding process was really, really easy – and that’s coming from someone that didn’t understand shipping at all!  

We were assigned an Implementation Specialist, and she helped us with everything: integrating our Shopify store to ShipBob’s dashboard, getting all of our inventory sent and stored in our first ShipBob fulfilment centre, and making sure we had what we needed. It was all very seamless.      

Now that the business has grown, I’m out of the role where I’m managing fulfilment or connecting with ShipBob’s team day-to-day, but I really appreciate how simple it was to get started with ShipBob.  

ShipBob’s fulfilment centres are nothing like that. I’ve been to multiple ShipBob locations, and I’ve seen how much they’ve invested into automation and how organised everything is. It’s no wonder that orders get out within 24 hours of being received – ShipBob is really good at what they do.   

“We’ve scaled so much, and there have been zero hiccups in fulfilment with ShipBob. I don’t think even as we keep scaling in the years to come that there will be any hiccups there. That cannot always be said of brands that run their own warehouse.  

Running your own warehouse, you have to go out and hire very experienced people, invest in equipment, build in automation – and often, you’re wasting a lot of time, energy, resources, and human capital for a sub-par result. Why do that when a partner like ShipBob exists, and makes fulfilment so easy at a fair price?”  

Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud 

Expanding from DTC to new B2B sales channels with ease 

Selling through multiple channels was key to scaling as fast as we have, and ShipBob’s expertise makes it much easier and less stressful. 

For instance, we got a DM from Walmart around six months in, and the subsequent meeting went really well. Walmart wanted to partner with us, and we reached out to ShipBob to find out if they could handle it. Immediately, ShipBob assigned multiple people from the B2B side onto our account. It was really reassuring that ShipBob had all the capabilities and setup to ensure that there were no delays, and we could just jump right into that new channel.   

“As we’ve added more B2B channels – like Walmart, Target, and Amazon – shipping has never been an area of concern, because we have ShipBob supporting us.”  

Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud 

We now fulfil our Target orders through ShipBob, and also leverage ShipBob’s FBA Prep solution to help us fulfil Amazon orders. Sometimes we’ll ship directly from our manufacturers, but when inventory ebbs and flows, we’re definitely leaning on ShipBob to handle replenishment. We feel totally comfortable using ShipBob when we need to for Amazon, and I feel very confident in all things Amazon when it comes to ShipBob. 

Achieving support from a fulfilment partner that feels like part of your team

As our company grew, we were assigned a truly phenomenal ShipBob Merchant Success Manager. We love her – we have weekly calls with her, and she really does feel like a part of our team.  

When you’re scaling pretty fast, snags are bound to come up, and we have the ability to call her anytime if there are issues. She’s always been super helpful for us, and we feel like when we reach out to her, she’s doing everything she can to make sure we get quick answers and things get taken care of.  

Having a single source of real-time truth across channels 

We used NetSuite at the last company I worked at, and it was super complex. There were multiple staff members that were just assigned to operate NetSuite. Now, at our company, we haven’t had to get any outside third-party or supply chain software.  

“Because we’ve been able to utilise ShipBob to fulfil all of our orders as a mini-ERP – including integrating directly to Amazon, multiple B2B channels, and our Shopify store – everything is so streamlined.” 

Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud 

In addition to ShipBob’s App Store and integrations, the ShipBob dashboard is great for real-time information with their built-in reporting. It’s one of the things that really separates ShipBob from the rest of the solutions on the market.  

I’ve oftentimes leveraged the data and analytics ShipBob provides when I’m preparing for sales meetings. I can see what our top selling states are, what our average fulfilment time and cost is, how much inventory we have on hand at each fulfilment centre – a lot of different metrics that are very helpful when you’re selling B2B. ShipBob has all of that information ready for us at any time.  

Leveraging strategic inventory placement to compete with Amazon Prime 

In the first couple years of our business, our products were constantly going in and out of stock because of how quickly the brand was growing and how high demand was. We wanted to make sure we could get good inventory levels at each location, so we joined ShipBob’s Inventory Placement Program to improve inventory allocation and distribution across the US.  

IPP has been a game changer for us. First, it reduces costs for us, because we’re shipping more orders a much shorter distance. Second, and maybe equally as important, it’s reducing the time that customers have to wait to get packages.  

“Reducing lead times through ShipBob’s strategic inventory distribution is super important, because we are basically competing against Amazon. We want our website to be the go-to purchasing platform for customers, and we don’t want shipping to be a reason why somebody might not make that choice.  

By distributing inventory across 3 ShipBob fulfilment centres through their Inventory Placement Program, our customers are getting their orders in a couple days. It’s very comparable to what customers been trained to expect with Amazon.”  

Tyler McCann, Co-Founder of Taste Salud 

And we’re still not even leveraging ShipBob’s network to its fullest extent. We’re currently in 3 ShipBob fulfilment centres, but we’ll probably add a couple more in the years to come. That will enable us to keep cutting shipping times and lowering shipping costs, which is key to continued growth.  

The other great thing about IPP is that it makes inventory allocation so much easier. Trying to figure out how much of what inventory to send where could be wildly complex for our supply chain managers – but since ShipBob automatically tracks our order and shipping data for us, that data basically tells us our optimal inventory distribution.  

We also get automatic reminders notifying us well before inventory levels are getting depleted, so we don’t have to constantly be checking our stock levels. IPP has saved our supply chain team a lot of extra work, and they also feel really supported by ShipBob and know that they can turn to them for help. 

Taste Salud’s team at ShipBob

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