Purpose-built for perishable commerce — serving 12+ countries See Pricing →

Perishly

Our Story

Built by a farmer
and a tech guy
who grew up together.

One brother never left the land. The other never stopped writing code. After 14 years and 92 active projects, they built the platform the food industry always deserved but never had.

The Farmer

JW

🌾

James Whitfield
Spent fifteen years running a 400-acre mixed farm — managing herds, negotiating with wholesale produce markets, and watching perfectly good produce rot because the buyers never got the order right. He knows what cold-chain failure smells like at 2 AM, and he built every compliance rule from personal experience.
&

The Engineer

DW

💻

Daniel Whitfield
Built distributed systems at three Silicon Valley companies before he got his brother’s call. He’d shipped software used by millions — but had never once thought about catch-weight pricing or FEFO rotation until James explained why it was costing him $40,000 a year in mis-billed orders and wasted inventory. That phone call changed everything.
2011
The phone call that started it
James calls Daniel from the farm: “I need software that understands a cow isn’t a SKU.” Daniel flies out. They sketch the first wireframe on a feed store receipt.
2012 – 2014
4 founding clients, 4 real problems
A Texas beef processor, a California CSA farm, a New England dairy, and a Gulf Coast seafood distributor. Each one taught them something no generic platform would surface. The platform grew from the ground up — literally.
2016
First international client — Austin, Texas
A wholesale poultry distributor needed WhatsApp ordering and Spanish support. They built it. Then came Dubai, then London, then Houston.
2020
AI enters the cold chain
During the supply chain crisis, clients needed demand forecasting, auto-ordering, and expiry intelligence. Daniel built the first AI intake engine in a single winter.
2024 – Today
Perishly — the platform
After 14 years of custom work, the brothers productized everything. 92 active deployments. 7 food verticals. the USA, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf States. One platform.
14 Years in the Making

The food industry didn't need another tech startup. It needed someone who'd been there.

James had been farming since before Daniel wrote his first line of code. He knew things that no product manager in San Francisco would ever think to ask about: how a 14-pound brisket needs to be billed differently than a 9-pound one. How a halal certification isn’t just a document — it’s a relationship with an inspector, a slaughter facility, and a community of buyers who will never forgive a mistake. How a bad batch expiry call at 4 AM can wipe out six weeks of margin.

Daniel knew how to build systems that scaled. But he’d spent his career building tools for industries where the product stayed on a shelf indefinitely. When James described the perishable supply chain — the temperature windows, the weight variability, the regulatory maze — Daniel’s first reaction was disbelief. His second was: “Why doesn’t this software exist?”

“Every platform we tried wanted to turn our farm into a t-shirt store. We needed something that understood the difference between a live weight and a packed weight — and could bill for both.”
— James Whitfield, Co-Founder

They started not with a pitch deck but with four real clients, four real problems, and a commitment to not ship anything until it actually worked in the field. That discipline — born of James’s frustration and Daniel’s engineering standards — is what separates Perishly from every platform that was adapted for food rather than built for it.

By 2016, clients were finding them from Austin, Texas to California. By 2020, the AI capabilities the broader tech world was just discovering, Perishly had already been applying specifically to harvest forecasting, order intake, and cold-chain anomaly detection. By 2024, 92 food businesses across the USA, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf States were running operations on infrastructure the brothers had spent 14 years perfecting.

They made Perishly a platform because the industry needed it — not because it was the easy next step.

The Core Argument

Why the food industry needs purpose-built software — not adapted software.

Generic eCommerce was engineered for products that sit on shelves indefinitely, weigh the same every time, and don’t require a certification to sell in certain markets. Food is none of those things.
01
Perishables expire. Generic inventory doesn't know that.

FEFO rotation, batch expiry, cold-chain thresholds — these have to be the foundation, not a plugin. Every generic platform treats expiry as an edge case. In food, it’s the primary case.

02
Food is priced by weight. Most platforms can't handle that.
A ribeye doesn’t weigh exactly 1 lb. Pre-authorization at estimated weight, final charge at actual packed weight — this requires a pricing engine no general-purpose platform has built natively.
03
Compliance in food isn't optional — and it changes constantly.
FDA FSMA 204, halal/kosher certification, allergen labeling, cottage food laws by state. None of these exist in generic eCommerce. Food operators who ignore them don’t lose sales — they face regulatory action.
04
The supply chain runs on relationships, not transactions.
WhatsApp orders. Net-30 terms. CSA member communities. B2B price lists per buyer. Food commerce is relational by nature — generic checkout flows miss the entire middle layer.
05
The global food economy is mobile-first and underserved.
United States’s agriculture is 24% of GDP. Australia’s food exports exceed \$48B. Canada’s 190,000+ farms generate over \$75B in receipts. None of them are served by platforms built in English for American Shopify stores.
06
Food operators don't have IT departments. It has to just work.
A rancher in Texas, a wholesale produce market trader in Dallas, a dairy farmer in Somerset — none of them want to manage plugin conflicts. Purpose-built means zero-config compliance and a UI that works at 4 AM.

Generic eCommerce Platform

VS

Perishly

How We Build

Field-first.
Always.

Every feature in Perishly was requested by a real operator with a real problem. We don’t build in the abstract. We build in the cold room.

Step 01
Listen on the ground
Every feature starts with a farm visit, a warehouse walkthrough, or a distributor operations review. Not a survey. Not a Zoom call.
Step 02
Map the real workflow
We document how operators actually work — not how they say they work. The gap between those two is where every failed software implementation lives.
Step 03
Build with them, not for them
Clients see every sprint. They test in real environments before we ship. If it doesn’t survive a 5 AM packing run, it goes back.
Step 04
Productize what works
What we learn from one vertical becomes available to all. Every CSA insight improves the seafood subscription engine. Every compliance win ships to every tier.
2011
Year we started — as operators who needed better tools, not as a startup
4
Founding clients whose real problems shaped the entire platform architecture
92
Active deployments across 7 food verticals and the USA, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf States today
14yr
Of field-first development before we called it a platform
What We Believe

The principles we
never negotiate on.

Empathy before elegance

We build for the person who’s been on their feet since before dawn, not for the product demo. If a feature doesn’t work with cold hands and no signal, it doesn’t ship.

Compliance is care, not paperwork

When a food operator gets a compliance alert from Perishly, it isn’t bureaucracy — it’s protection. We built the compliance engine because we’ve seen what happens when it fails.

The global food chain deserves global tools

Most food software is built for one country, one language, one payment rail. The farmers in the Central Valley and the distributors in Sacramento have equal right to purpose-built tools.

DTC and B2B aren't two businesses

We build for the person who’s been on their feet since before dawn, not for the product demo. If a feature doesn’t work with cold hands and no signal, it doesn’t ship.

AI should understand food, not just orders

Our AI was trained on perishable supply chain data — harvest cycles, temperature deviation patterns, expiry curves. It doesn’t treat a case of ribeye the same as a case of sneakers.

We're operators first, technologists second

One of our founders still farms. That never changes. The day we forget what it costs to lose a batch or miss a delivery window is the day we stop being qualified to build this.

Life at Perishly

A small team that ships
things that actually matter.

Remote-first, field-obsessed, and still small enough that every person here has talked to a real food operator in the last 30 days

🌍

Distributed across 3 continents
Our team spans North America, North America, and the Middle East — which isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same geography our clients operate in.

🚜

Field visits are not optional
Every engineer does at least one farm, warehouse, or distributor visit per year. You cannot build great food software without getting your boots dirty.

🎯

Opinionated about quality
We would rather ship one deeply right feature than ten half-baked ones. The food industry does not forgive software bugs — and neither do we.

We hire people who care about food as much as code.

Engineers, product designers, and food industry veterans. If you have ever gotten genuinely angry at a spreadsheet while trying to run a food business — we should talk.

Ready to work with us?

14 years. From Texas farms
to Gulf distributors to Sydney docks.

See exactly how Perishly works for your vertical, your order volume, and your team — in a 30-minute demo with someone who actually knows the food industry.