For food & drink brands · 50–5,000 SKUs · £250K–£25M revenue
Food catalogs don’t lose on taste. They lose on a missing allergen field.
AI shopping agents filter food-and-drink on allergens, nutrition, provenance, certifications, shelf life and unit pricing. When those fields live on your back-of-pack imagery and inside description prose instead of structured metafields, the agent skips your store for the brand that published structured data. Eight food-specific mistakes below — each one concretely observable in a real Shopify catalog.
Food & drink benchmark
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awaiting first scan
Food scores appear here as soon as the first stores land in the dataset. Run yours to seed it.
Run the free scan →Eight food-and-drink mistakes
Each one is concretely observable. Each one is scored on every scan.
Allergen declarations buried in description prose
UK Big-14 allergens — gluten, eggs, milk, soya, peanuts, sesame, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, celery, mustard, nuts, lupin, sulphites — belong in a structured allergen field. Yours are written into the description as 'contains gluten and milk'. Agents filtering 'dairy-free' can't trust prose. They skip.
Flintmere: Flintmere checks every product for a structured allergen metafield using the UK FSA taxonomy and flags products with allergen mentions in prose but empty structured fields. Non-negotiable for regulatory-aware agent queries.
Check · Structured attributes
Nutritional panel delivered as a back-of-pack PNG
Your nutrition table is an image — every food brand's is. But agents answering 'low-sugar chocolate' or 'high-protein snack' can't parse a JPG. A shopper gets the brand that published structured per-100g macros. Your product, however good, isn't considered.
Flintmere: We scan for structured nutrition metafields (per 100g: energy_kcal, fat, saturates, carbs, sugars, protein, salt) and flag image-only panels. Even a partial structured fill (energy + sugars + salt) lifts your agent-visibility dramatically.
Check · Structured attributes
Origin and provenance claims without structured country-of-origin
Your description talks about 'single-origin Ethiopian beans' or 'British free-range eggs'. Beautiful; no structured country_of_origin field. Agents serving 'British cheese' or 'Italian pasta' queries depend on this metafield. Your provenance-led positioning is invisible to the filter.
Flintmere: Flintmere checks for country_of_origin using the ISO 3166-1 spec (GB, IT, ET, FR) and flags products using only prose provenance. We also flag products with Protected Designation of Origin terms in the title but no structured PDO field.
Check · Google category match
Certifications sitting inside descriptions, not as structured flags
Organic, Fairtrade, Kosher, Halal, Red Tractor, Soil Association — all mentioned in your descriptions, none structured. A shopper asking for 'organic olive oil' gets brands with a structured certifications array. Your certification investment pays for shelf signage, not agent discovery.
Flintmere: We check for a certifications metafield using the industry standard list (organic, fairtrade, kosher, halal, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free-certified, red-tractor) and flag products using prose-only certification claims.
Check · Structured attributes
Best-before and shelf-life metafields empty
Agents answering 'subscribe-and-save coffee' or 'gift hamper for next month' lean on shelf_life + best_before metadata. Yours is empty on 100% of perishables. Meal-kit and gift-hamper queries — two of the fastest-growing food agent categories — default to brands that ship the field.
Flintmere: Flintmere checks for shelf_life_days or best_before_months metafields on products in perishable categories and flags products that appear perishable (by category or supplier pattern) but ship no shelf-life data.
Check · Data consistency
Unit pricing missing — no per kg, per 100g, per litre
Agents filter food-and-drink by unit price constantly. 'Coffee under £40/kg.' 'Olive oil under £20/litre.' Your product lists a price for a 250g bag with no unit_price metafield. The filter skips you. The customer chooses the brand that populated the field.
Flintmere: We check for unit_price + unit_pricing_measure on every variant (GBP per kg / litre / 100g / each) and flag missing ones. Legally required on some UK marketplace listings; agent-required on nearly all query types.
Check · Structured attributes
GTINs missing on private-label and subscription box SKUs
Your wholesale-sourced hero products have GTINs. Your own-brand private-label range and your monthly subscription box don't. Agents treat un-GTINed products as unverified; they demote them in comparison results. The subscription box — your highest-margin product — ranks worst.
Flintmere: Flintmere flags every variant missing a barcode, validates the checksum on the ones you have, and groups the missing ones by internal vs. wholesale — so you route the GS1 UK purchase decision to the private-label launches first.
Check · Product IDs
Shipping restrictions invisible to agents (alcohol, chilled, age-restricted)
You ship alcohol, chilled meats, or age-restricted products. An agent recommending your 'artisan charcuterie box' to a shopper in a chilled-delivery blackout zone sends them to a checkout failure. Trust drops; the next agent recommendation goes to a competitor that declared its shipping rules.
Flintmere: Flintmere checks for a shipping_restrictions or requires_age_verification metafield on applicable products and flags products where the title or category implies a restriction but the metafield is empty.
Check · Agent checkout readiness
Concierge audit for food & drink
Send your shop URL. Three working days later, a written audit lands in your inbox.
£97 gets you the team reading your catalog product by product: a 1,500-word letter pointing at specific SKUs by name (food teams get the allergen, nutrition, provenance and certifications reads as standard), a per-product fix CSV with the worst ten already drafted — structured allergens, per-100g macros, country of origin, certifications — a 30-day fix sequence, the right GS1 UK route for your private-label and subscription SKUs, and a 30-day re-scan. No video, no call, no slide deck.