Partner Spotlight: Barrel's Strategy for Turning On-Site Engagement into Long-Term CPG Growth with Octane AI

Most CPG brands aren't built around an online store.

Their products live on grocery shelves, in big-box retailers, and at farmers' markets. The website is often an afterthought—a product catalog, maybe a recipe page, a “where to buy” button buried in the footer.

Barrel thinks that's a missed opportunity.

The globally distributed agency has spent 20 years helping CPG brands treat their websites as more than brochures. In Barrel's model, the website is the center of gravity—the digital flagship that connects every other channel, tells the brand story, and earns the kind of customer trust that turns a first-time buyer into a repeat one.

For brands like Cabot Creamery, that meant figuring out how to build an engaging digital experience for a product most people still buy at the grocery store.

When a great product outgrows its website

When David Remes, Barrel's Partnerships Manager, describes the brands that come to them, a pattern emerges quickly.

These are brands with great products, loyal customers, and real distribution, but websites that aren't keeping pace. Sometimes the site is outdated. Sometimes it's been migrated poorly. Sometimes it simply doesn't know how to talk to the right audience anymore.

“Most of our brands realize their website is not talking to the right audience, or they feel it's outdated in any way, shape, or form. So they come to us for a strategic approach where we can interview their stakeholders, their clients, their internal teams to really understand what their brand is all about today and what it means for their brand in the near future.”

–David Remes, Partnerships Manager, Barrel

But Barrel's work isn't just aesthetic. It's architectural.

The website as the center of the brand's digital presence

At Barrel, the website is the brand's digital flagship. Meta, email, retail, and search each have a role to play, but the website is the only place where a CPG brand can deliver the full experience, tell the full story, and bring all other channels together in one place. It's the foundation that makes the rest of the ecosystem work harder.

“The website should educate the customer about what you're selling, but also tell the right story. We design websites to meet clients where they want to purchase the product, whether that's retail or online. Brands should meet customers in the channel they prefer.”

–David Remes, Partnerships Manager, Barrel

That philosophy shapes everything from site architecture to integration choices. It's also why Barrel works exclusively with CPG brands rather than taking on website projects across all verticals.

“CPG has been in Barrel's DNA since day one — one of our first projects was the original KIND Snacks ecommerce site. A few years ago, we made the call to go all in on the category, and that focus is what lets us think the way a CPG brand actually has to: omnichannel by default, with the website as the connective tissue between retail, email, and search.”

–David Remes, Partnerships Manager, Barrel

The unique challenge of selling CPG products online

One of the most interesting challenges in CPG ecommerce is what to do when the website isn't the primary channel for customer purchases. For many brands, especially in food and beverage, most purchases still happen offline at grocery stores or retail stores. The site still plays a critical role, but its job isn't to drive the bulk of revenue.

That creates a different design problem: how do you build a website that earns attention, tells a story, and captures data from customers who may never check out?

For Cabot Creamery, a farmer-owned cooperative making award-winning cheese and dairy products since 1919, this was exactly the tension. Cabot Creamery's audience already loves the product. The website needed to deepen that relationship, surface the right products for the right occasions, and build a data foundation for ongoing marketing, without relying on transaction volume to justify the investment.

How Barrel brought Octane AI into the Cabot Creamery strategy

Barrel doesn't lead with quizzes. Their engagements typically begin with strategy: understanding the brand, auditing the experience, and aligning on what the website needs to do. Quizzes become part of the solution when there's a specific engagement or data problem to solve.

With Cabot Creamery, there was a clear opportunity.

The brand had a rich product line, a loyal customer base, and a strong content ecosystem built around recipes and food occasions.

What was missing was an interactive touchpoint that could help customers navigate the catalog, capture preferences, and seed personalized follow-up. That's where Octane AI came in.

“Cabot came to Barrel with a vision to create an interactive quiz that guides customers in building their own charcuterie board using Cabot's high-quality products. Charcuterie board curation has grown in popularity in recent years, and we aimed to create a solution that would drive traffic to the site and increase on-site engagement.”

–Sam Lynn, Senior Account Manager, Barrel

1. The quiz as a content experience, not just a funnel

Barrel built Cabot Creamery a digital Charcuterie Board quiz, a personality-driven experience that asks shoppers about their occasion, preferences, and hosting style, then delivers personalized cheese and product pairings along with recipe suggestions.

The premise is smart: charcuterie boards are inherently social and seasonal, which means the quiz has natural replay value. Someone building a date-night spread thinks differently from someone hosting a holiday party. The quiz meets them where they are.

For Barrel, the quiz was never just about driving a transaction. It was about meeting customers earlier in the journey—helping them explore products and recipes that actually made sense for them, long before they were ready to buy.

“Our goal for the quiz was to direct users to engage with Cabot recipes, while also collecting first-party data so we can continue the conversation.”

–Sam Lynn, Senior Account Manager, Barrel

2. First-party data as infrastructure, not a bonus

For CPG brands that rely heavily on retail, email lists are a strategic asset, often more valuable than checkout conversion rates.

The Cabot Creamery quiz was designed to build that asset through a natural, low-friction exchange: shoppers share their occasion and preferences, and in return, they get a personalized board recommendation and an email with tailored results.

That opt-in becomes the foundation for post-quiz Klaviyo flows tied to recipe content, seasonal campaigns, and product education, all of which are relevant to what the shopper already told the brand they care about.

3. Connecting on-site engagement to the broader digital ecosystem

One of Barrel's consistent goals is to make sure the website doesn't operate in isolation. The quiz plugged directly into Cabot Creamery's existing Klaviyo setup, meaning the zero-party data collected through quiz responses flows into email and SMS automations without manual overhead.

This kind of integration matters more in CPG than it might elsewhere. When a brand's website isn't the primary transaction channel, every piece of behavioral data is precious. The quiz helped Cabot Creamery collect it with intention.

Results that go beyond the transaction

For Cabot Creamery, the impact of Barrel's full engagement shows up across both digital performance and customer engagement. The numbers below reflect the combined optimization work, with the Octane AI quiz contributing to on-site engagement and first-party data collection as part of that broader effort.

• 9% increase in SMS click rate
• 6% increase in email click rate
• 15% lift in organic traffic
• 2x increase in total ranking keywords

Together, these results point to a brand that's not just growing its online presence but building deeper, more sustained connections with its customers across every touchpoint.

What makes a technology partnership work in CPG

Barrel looks for partners who understand the same clients they do—the retail dependencies, the offline-first buying behavior, the need for a DTC website to do more than move product.

“We partner with tech vendors that speak the same language and understand the nuances of CPG brands. Not every great tech partner is the right fit for every CPG brand, and that's the part most agencies skip over. We pressure-test every partner against the same criteria: client size and vertical fit, depth of CPG expertise, how the integration behaves in a live Shopify store, post-launch support, and track record with brands that look like our client's. Octane AI cleared every one of those bars for Cabot because they actually understood the brand we were working with, not just the product they sell.”

–David Remes, Partnerships Manager, Barrel

That shared understanding is what made the Cabot Creamery collaboration work. Barrel brought the site strategy and CPG context; Octane AI brought the quiz infrastructure and data layer. Neither piece works as well without the other.

Building for engagement, not just conversion

For most CPG brands, the website will never be the primary place customers buy. But it can still be the place they choose to stay loyal to.

Barrel's work with Cabot Creamery is a case for building digital experiences that earn that loyalty—through education, personalization, and guided discovery that meet customers when they're curious, not just when they're ready to check out. The quiz didn't replace the grocery store. It gave Cabot Creamery a way to show up before and after it.

With Octane AI, that kind of guided discovery becomes easier to build and easier to scale. Zero-party data collected through quizzes can power personalized recommendations, smarter segmentation, and lifecycle marketing that adapts to what each customer actually wants, whether or not they ever buy directly online.

For CPG brands looking to close the gap between awareness and loyalty, the starting point is simpler than it looks.

Book a demo to see how Octane AI can work alongside your agency and your existing stack.

Working with a CPG brand and looking for an agency partner? Get in touch with Barrel.