Gourmet food products business enjoys ecommerce boost

Innovative Food Holdings, which provides chefs and consumers direct access to specialty food products as well as gift boxes and other curated products, is enjoying a big bite of the pandemic-driven ecommerce boon.

The Bonita Springs-based publicly traded company, according to a statement, posted $10.5 million in ecommerce sales in the 2020 fourth quarter — a 90% increase over $5.5 million from the 2019 fourth quarter. Visitors to the firm’s website also nearly doubled year-over-year, from 1 million to 1.9 million. It had some 1 million website visitors in December 2020 alone, the release states, compared to 500,000 in December 2019.

“Ecommerce momentum has accelerated as consumers have shifted to online purchasing,” Innovative Food CEO Sam Klepfish says in the statement. “Furthermore, we have been able to drive and support record demand through the investments we have made in our ecommerce platform over the past two years and we achieved record orders, website visitors and conversions across our ecommerce business.”

Those investment include a move into a new distribution center in Pennsylvania and a new igourmet website featuring a modern user interface supported by Shopify. The company also recently announced it’s launching an epicurean-focused gourmet food collection in partnership with department store Macy’s at macys.com.

Even as ecommerce momentum builds, expenses and other costs have eaten into profits of late at the company, traded over the counter under the symbol IVFH. While fourth quarter and annual financial figures haven’t been filed as of Feb. 15, the company reported operating losses of at least $1.5 million in each of the first three quarters of 2020. That cumulated in a $4.57 million operating loss in the 12 months through Sept. 30, securities filings show. The company had $57.9 million in revenue in 2019.