Shopify redesign

New Canaan Farms: Shopify Redesign

A family food maker in Utopia, Texas, has been simmering jams, salsas and sauces since 1979. Their website looked like a price list. We rebuilt it around what they actually sell: food for gathering, made in the Texas Hill Country.

Client
New Canaan Farms
Location
Utopia, Texas
Platform
Shopify, Ignite theme
Timeline
Aug 12 to Oct 13, 2026
Studio
Braun Design Co, Austin
Our role
Design, build, data, accessibility, AEO
Before: The old homepage. A plain header with a boxed logo, and a close-up of jam jars on a gingham cloth under the headline Share Something Delicious This Fall. After: The new homepage. A green announcement ticker and a trust bar sit around a centered script logo, above a photo of two children sharing a jar of jam at a creek-side picnic in Utopia. A cream panel on the photo's bottom edge holds the headline Handcrafted in Utopia, for Happy Gatherings Everywhere and a red Shop button.

Drag the slider or use the arrow keys. Higher values show more of the old version.

The New Canaan Farms homepage before and after, first screen at 1440 pixels wide.

Great food, a flat storefront

New Canaan Farms makes more than 70 specialty foods by hand, in a historic water plant on Main Street in Utopia, Texas. They had what most food brands want: strong photography, beautiful label art, a loyal following and recipes people share.

The website showed none of it. Products sat in plain grids. There was no path from a recipe to the jar it calls for, no cross-sell and no story. Most visitors arrive on a phone, often from a recipe they saw on social media, and the fourth quarter is the company's biggest season. The new site had to be live before holiday shopping started.

What the brief asked for

  • Two paths to purchase: shop by product type, or by occasion.
  • Product pages that sell: recipes, pairings, reviews and real answers.
  • The brand story, on screen: Utopia, the family and the kitchen.
  • Phone first: more than half of visits come from phones.
  • Readable by machines: structured content for search engines and AI assistants.
  • Pages the team can run: seasonal landing pages with no developer needed.
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GO TEXAN

A Texas brand, a Texas studio

New Canaan Farms is part of GO TEXAN, the Texas Department of Agriculture's program for highlighting products grown and made in Texas. Braun Design Co is a Shopify studio in Austin, and Texas makers are the brands we build for.

New Canaan Farms is about as Texas as a pantry gets: Fredericksburg Peach Jam, Brazos River Blackberry Jam, Old Austin Apricot Jam, Hill Country Caviar, Pedernales Picante Sauce, Blanco River Applekraut and Tejas Grilling and BBQ Sauce, among others. We gave those products a home of their own, Taste of Texas, one of six new ways to shop by occasion.

The new site footer in maroon: the New Canaan Farms script logo, the Utopia address and store hours, Shop and Explore menus, the GO TEXAN mark and payment icons.
The GO TEXAN mark sits in the footer of every page, beside the shop's Main Street address and hours.

Homepage

A homepage that walks you through the pantry

The old homepage had a seasonal banner, six category photos, a recipe row and a bestseller row: a catalog index. The new one is a guided walk. It says who they are, what to shop, what to make, who makes it, and how to buy for a crowd. Every section is a Shopify section the team edits in the theme editor.

Before
The old homepage, full length: a fall banner, Shop by Category, a recipe row, a bestseller row with Notify Me buttons, a scrolling free shipping strip, a newsletter box over a photo of two horses, and the footer.
After
The new New Canaan Farms homepage, full length, from the announcement ticker and trust bar to the footer. The numbered list after this comparison describes each section in order.
  1. Header, ticker and trust bar

    Rotating offers with a pause button, a centered logo, and four reasons to trust the shop: over 40 years, over 100,000 orders, guaranteed happiness, five-star reviews.

  2. Hero slideshow

    Each slide carries its own color scheme, so the marketing team can rotate photos monthly without breaking text contrast.

  3. Who they are

    One paragraph about the family, Utopia and the Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef behind the recipes.

  4. Shop by category

    All six product categories as photo tiles.

  5. Seasonal landing tiles

    Savor the Season and Build a Better Board lead to landing pages that rotate each year.

  6. As seen on TV

    A band for press moments, here a Great Day SA cheese board segment.

  7. What customers say

    A scrolling row of real five-star reviews, each linked to the product it praises.

  8. Recipes

    High Flavor, Low Stress Cooking: a recipe carousel with a shared Prev and Next control.

  9. Welcome to Utopia

    Two story tiles lead to the family's story and the Stories from Utopia blog.

  10. Bestsellers

    Add to cart right in the row, with sold-out jars moved to the end.

  11. Instagram

    Good Food and Happy Gatherings, a live feed with focus rings drawn inside each tile.

  12. Corporate and wholesale

    Red and gold panels for the two business programs.

  13. Email sign-up

    Ten percent off the first order, collected by Shopify so the list stays theirs if they change email apps.

Navigation

Two ways in: what it is, or what it's for

The menus now follow how people think about food. Shop by product type, from jams to spice blends, or by occasion: Backyard Entertaining, Weekend Brunch, Cocktail Hour, Cheese and Charcuterie, Taste of Texas and Pantry Heroes. The six occasion collections are driven by product tags, so a new jar shows up in the right places as soon as it is tagged. Existing collection addresses were kept, so search rankings carried over.

The Shop menu open: photo tiles for six product categories, a column of eight collections including Taste of Texas and Seasonal Flavors, and a large Gift Boxes and Sets tile.
Shop menu

Categories with photos, occasion collections in words, and gifts as the one big picture. The labels Customer Favorites and Seasonal Flavors are evergreen, so each season only the link behind them changes.

The Our Story menu open: three photo tiles for About Us, Stories from Utopia and Visit Utopia.
Our Story menu

The family, the blog and the town, one click from any page.

The search overlay with the word peach typed: three matching products with prices on the left, three peach recipes on the right.
Search as you type

Products and recipes side by side, so a search for peach finds the jam and what to make with it.

Product pages

Product pages that answer the next question

The old product page had a photo, a price and an ingredients box. The new one is assembled from product data the team keeps in Shopify, so every jar gets the same depth without a developer: what it tastes like, what is in it, how hot it is, what to make with it, what goes with it, and answers to the questions shoppers actually ask.

Before
The old Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa page: a product photo with thumbnails, the title, price and add to cart, an ingredients box, a dietary preferences accordion, the description, a row of four generic service icons, customer reviews and the footer.
After
The new Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa product page on New Canaan Farms, full length, from the buy box to the footer. The numbered list after this comparison describes each section in order.
  1. Buy box

    The photo frame takes its color from the product's category. Dietary badges and a heat meter sit under the button.

  2. The story and its recipes

    The description with serving ideas, beside recipes that use the jar.

  3. Nutrition Facts and what is inside

    A real Nutrition Facts panel, typed from label photos into structured data, next to ingredients, dietary tags and allergens.

  4. How hot do you like it?

    The whole family of salsas or sauces, mildest to hottest, with this one marked.

  5. Reviews and pairings

    Judge.me reviews in a card, then products that go with this one.

  6. More recipes

    A recipe band in the product's own colors.

  7. Questions

    Answers written with the New Canaan Farms team and stored as structured content.

The new buy box for Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa: the jar inside a thick red frame, thumbnails including the nutrition label, the Salsas category label, the title in tall capitals, a five-star rating, price, quantity stepper, a red Add to Cart button, Shop Pay, shipping notes, and round badges for vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free and vegetarian beside a heat meter reading mild.
The buy box

Salsas get a red frame, and every other category its own color. One setting per category drives the frame, the panels and the accents, so a shopper always knows which shelf they are on.

The What is inside section: a Nutrition Facts panel with serving size, calories and daily values, next to ingredients, dietary tags and an allergen note.
Nutrition Facts, as data

Label photos transcribed into structured entries and drawn as a real panel, readable by screen readers and search engines alike.

The heat ladder on the Habanero Salsa page: a row of salsa jars from Hill Country Caviar to Demon Salsa, each with a five-step heat meter, Habanero Salsa outlined in red and marked You are here, and Milder and Hotter controls under the row.
How hot do you like it?

A heat rating from 1 to 5 on 31 products builds this ladder on its own. It opens with the current jar in view, and the row controls read Milder and Hotter.

The Questions section: an accordion of shopper questions about the salsa.
Questions and answers

Stored once and attached to products and categories. A new product inherits its category's answers until it gets its own.

The You May Also Like row: five product cards with photos, names, prices and Add to Cart buttons.
Cross-sell that makes sense

Hand-picked pairings from Shopify's Search and Discovery app, with Shopify's own recommendations as the fallback.

Collections

Shelves, not spreadsheets

Category pages open on a full-width photo with the category's color label, then a short introduction the team writes. Bestsellers are badged, and every card adds to the cart in one click. On the bigger categories, chips filter by type in place, and Load more adds products without sending shoppers to page two, with keyboard focus on the first new product. A recipe band and the category's questions close the page.

Before
The old Salsas collection: a script heading beside a photo, then a filter sidebar for availability and price next to a grid of jar photos on white, and the footer.
After
The new Salsas collection: a wide photo of cilantro salsa and chili with a red Salsas label, a short introduction, a product count and sort menu, a four-across grid of jars and gift sets with Bestseller badges, star ratings and Add to Cart buttons, a Recipes to Try band and ten questions about salsas.

Recipes

Every recipe leads back to the pantry

Recipes bring in most of the brand's social traffic, so each one now ends with the products it uses, under Featured Products and Possible Substitutions, with Add to cart right there. Product pages link back the other way. The recipe index filters by course and loads more in place.

We also cleaned up 59 recipe posts pasted in from Google Docs. In 54 of them, the leftover formatting had hidden the ingredient and direction lists from screen readers.

Before
The old recipe page for Tejas BBQ Chicken and Pineapple Pizza: a script title, the photo, ingredients and directions, share icons, an In this article card for the sauce, and the footer.
After
The new recipe page: a course label, the title in capitals, the photo in a white mat, ingredients and directions as real lists, previous and next recipes by name, Featured Products and Possible Substitutions with Add to Cart, and a More Recipes band.

AEO

Answers an AI assistant can quote

More shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers which salsa to buy, whether a jam is gluten-free, or how hot a sauce is. Those tools answer from pages that state the facts in plain text. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of putting those facts there.

On the old site, most of those answers lived in label photos or nowhere at all. Now they are stored as product data in Shopify and printed as text on every product page, so a shopper, a screen reader and an AI assistant all read the same thing. The same facts are also labeled for machines: Recipe markup on every recipe, FAQ markup on every set of questions, and Organization and Store markup for the company and its Main Street shop.

  • 367 questions and answers written with the New Canaan Farms team, on 99 products and 14 collections
  • 66 of 73 jars with a Nutrition Facts panel in live text, typed from photos of the labels
  • 63 of 63 recipes marked up for search engines with ingredients, steps, servings and times
  • 62 of 63 recipes linked to the products they use, and each product links back
  • 100 products with their ingredients stored as text
  • 13 collections with new introductions at the top of the page

What a shopper, or an AI assistant, reads on one product page

From the Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa page, shown here as live text.

Nutrition Facts About 15 servings per container Serving size 2 Tbsp. (33g)
Amount per serving % Daily Value
Calories15
Total Fat0g0%
Saturated Fat0g0%
Trans Fat0g
Cholesterol0mg0%
Sodium80mg3%
Total Carbohydrate3g1%
Dietary Fiber1g4%
Total Sugars1g
Includes Added Sugars0g0%
Protein0g
Vitamin D0mcg0%
Calcium10mg0%
Iron0.4mg2%
Potassium70mg2%

* The % Daily Value tells you how much a nutrient in a serving of food contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

On the old site, the Nutrition Facts panel was only a photo of the label in the product gallery.

What does Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa taste like?
The fire-roasted character gives it a deeper, slightly smoky cantina-style flavor that feels more robust than a bright, fresh salsa.
Can Fire-Roasted Cantina Salsa be cooked into a recipe?
Yes. Stir it into a breakfast casserole, soups and evening casseroles for a burst of extra flavor, spoon it over chicken before baking, or use it as a shortcut sauce for Tex-Mex-inspired one-pan meals.

Ingredients: Tomatoes (tomatoes, tomato juice, salt, calcium chloride, citric acid), fire roasted tomatoes (tomatoes, tomato juice, salt, calcium chloride, citric acid), onions, jalapeños, garlic, lime juice concentrate, tomato paste (tomatoes), cumin, sea salt, spices.

Dietary and heat: Vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free and vegetarian. Heat: mild, 2 on a scale of 1 to 5.

Questions and answers are New Canaan Farms' own words. The team adds a question, a nutrition panel or a heat rating in Shopify admin, and every page that shows it updates.

Gifting

Built first: a gifting page for corporate clients

Corporate gifting was the first thing we built, ahead of a September email campaign to corporate clients. Gift boxes are real products with real prices. Buyers can ship one order to many addresses straight from the cart, through Giftship, and the page closes with a short inquiry form and gifting questions.

Before
The old Corporate Gifting page: a banner, an introduction, a grid of gift collections and a contact form.
After
The new Corporate Gifting page: a Send a Taste of Texas banner with three selling points, a client testimonial on sage green, an introduction with a Contact Us button, twelve gift boxes with Add to Cart, Make It Uniquely Yours options for custom and branded boxes, an inquiry form and gifting questions.

Basket

A basket, not a cart

The cart drawer became Your Basket. A band across the top counts down to free shipping in brand red and turns sage green when the order qualifies, with a short notice that screen readers announce too. Quantity steppers and a Remove link that is always visible carry over to the full cart page, so the two never drift apart.

Before: The old Your Cart drawer, with a thin progress bar toward free shipping, the peach jam with a SKU and small up and down arrows, shipping calculator and order notes accordions, and a View Cart button. After: The Your Basket drawer, with a red band reading You're $47.50 away from free shipping, the peach jam with a quantity stepper and a Remove link, the subtotal, a red View Cart button and Continue Shopping.

Drag the slider or use the arrow keys. Higher values show more of the old version.

The cart drawer before and after, with two jars of peach jam.

New pages

Landing pages the team can reuse every season

Three landing pages launched with the site, built from the same set of sections so the team can make more without a developer. The seasonal page lives at an evergreen address: next season, they swap the content and every link to it keeps working.

The Fall Flavors landing page on New Canaan Farms: an autumn table of pumpkins, apples and jars of Cranberry Pepper Jam, Country Apple Butter and Pecan Honey Crème under the heading Savor the Flavors of Fall, then an introduction to the season's recipes.
Fall Flavors

Recipes picked for the season, followed by every product they call for, each listed once.

The Game Day Gatherings landing page on New Canaan Farms: sheet pan nachos, snack mix, queso and chips with salsa under the heading Game Day Gatherings, then an introduction to crowd-pleasing recipes.
Game Day Gatherings

Dips, salsas and wings for a crowd, linked from the homepage hero.

The Build a Better Board landing page on New Canaan Farms: a cheese and charcuterie spread with jars of Lemon Fig Jam, Green Olive Tapenade and Olive Rosemary Dijon Mustard under the heading Build a Better Board.
Build a Better Board

Six board styles, from Soft and Creamy to a Texas Board, each with three jars to add in one click.

The New Canaan Farms wholesale page: five salsa jars on a wooden rail under the heading Partner With Us, Share the flavors of Utopia with your customers, then a retailer testimonial on sage green.
Wholesale

One wholesale page instead of two, built around ordering on Faire, with the old address redirected.

Mobile

Designed for the phone in your hand

Phones bring most of the traffic, so every template was checked at phone widths down to 320 pixels. Rows of recipes and products swipe sideways, a slim add-to-cart bar follows you down product pages, and the menu opens into full-width sections.

Before
The old homepage on a phone: a shipping banner, a small logo beside account and cart icons, a full-width search box, then a fall promotion with white headline text set directly over a photo of jars, a Shop Now button, and the start of a Shop by Category grid.
After
The new homepage on a phone: a scrolling announcement bar with a pause button, the script logo centered between menu and cart icons, a trust strip with a five-star rating, then a photo of two children by a lake with the slide dots on a plum pill at the top and a cream panel at the bottom holding the line Handcrafted in Utopia, for Happy Gatherings Everywhere and a red Shop button.
Homepage

The trust strip, the Utopia photo and a clear Shop button all fit on the first screen.

Before
The old product page on a phone: a shipping banner, a small boxed logo between a menu icon and account and cart icons, a full-width search box, a breadcrumb, the salsa jar on white with a next arrow, then the title, five stars, a 276 in stock badge and the price in US dollars.
After
The new product page on a phone: three announcement messages, the centered script logo, the trust strip with five stars, a breadcrumb through Salsas, the jar inside a thick red frame, a grid of thumbnails including the nutrition label, and the Salsas label above the title.
Product page

The full product story in the same order as desktop, with the buy button always one tap away.

A product page scrolled down on a phone, past the buy button, with a slim bar pinned to the bottom showing the product name, the price and an Add button.
Sticky buy bar

Pages scroll so the focused control is never hidden under it.

The phone menu open with the Shop section expanded into categories and collections.
Phone menu

The same two paths to purchase, as expanding sections.

More before and after

Every page, one design

No old-look pages were left behind at launch. Our Story, contact, FAQ, policies, search, the 404 page, the password page and the cart page all moved to the new design, using the same sections.

Before
The old Our Story page, first screen: a script title over a Hill Country river view, then the story beside a photo of jams.
After
The new Our Story page, first screen: the same river view with the title in a framed box, then the story beside the jam photo in a white mat.
Our Story

The family, the team at work and the Main Street store.

Before
The old recipe index, first screen.
After
The new recipe index, first screen.
Recipe index

Course filters and Load more replace numbered pages.

Before
The Taste of Texas collection on the old theme, first screen.
After
The Taste of Texas collection on the new theme, first screen.
Taste of Texas

One of six new occasion collections, shown on both themes.

Before
The old cart page with two jars of peach jam.
After
The new Your Basket page with two jars of peach jam, a free shipping band, and bestsellers below.
Cart page

Restyled to match the basket drawer, with the multi-address shipping and express checkout buttons intact.

Under the hood

The work you don't see

A good-looking store is only as good as the data behind it. Much of this project went into structure the New Canaan Farms team can keep running on their own.

Accessibility figures come from axe-core 4 with the WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, run on October 14, 2026 against the saved pre-launch theme and the live site, on eight key pages at desktop and phone widths.

  • 9 weeks from kickoff to launch, in time for the holiday season
  • 6 new shop-by-occasion collections, filled automatically by product tags
  • 3 seasonal landing pages the team can rotate and reuse
  • 31 products with heat ratings that build the heat ladder
  • 230 product photos given descriptive alt text for screen readers and search
  • 59 recipe posts cleaned of pasted formatting
  • 86% smaller files for all 26 new photos, resized and compressed so pages load quickly on phones
  • 0 automated accessibility issues on the live site, down from 56
  • 0 theme check errors at launch, including 11 inherited from the old theme

  • Product data the team can maintain

    • Heat level, a number from 1 to 5, drives the heat meter and the heat ladder.
    • Nutrition panels and FAQs are stored once as structured entries and linked to products and categories.
    • One color setting per category tints its panels, frames and accents.
    • Activity tags on 65 products fill the six occasion collections.
    • Recipes list their products, and products list their recipes.
    • Content was loaded through Shopify's Admin API, with every write approved and a rollback file kept.

  • Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA

    • Anything that moves can be paused, and motion stops for visitors who ask their device for less of it.
    • Sticky bars never cover the control that has keyboard focus.
    • Load more sends keyboard focus to the first new item.
    • Free shipping progress is announced to screen readers.
    • Brand colors were adjusted where they missed contrast, from the footer gold to the free shipping band.
    • Every new section was reviewed for keyboard, screen reader and contrast issues before it was built.

  • Built on what they had

    • The existing Ignite theme was extended, not replaced, so its apps and settings carried over.
    • Collection addresses were kept to protect search rankings.
    • Structured data on every page type: Organization, Store, Product with reviews, CollectionPage, FAQPage, Recipe and breadcrumbs, with zero errors in schema.org's validator.
    • The pre-launch theme was saved as a dated backup, so rolling back is one click.

Questions about this project

What is GO TEXAN?

GO TEXAN is the Texas Department of Agriculture's program for highlighting products grown and made in Texas. New Canaan Farms is part of it, and the GO TEXAN mark sits in the footer of every page of the new site.

Is Braun Design Co based in Texas?

Yes. Braun Design Co is a Shopify studio in Austin, and Texas makers like New Canaan Farms are the brands we build for.

How long did the redesign take?

About nine weeks, from kickoff on August 12 to launch on October 13, 2026, in time for the holiday season.

Did New Canaan Farms change Shopify themes?

No. We extended the store's existing Ignite theme with new sections, so its apps, settings and collection addresses carried over.

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

AEO is the work of making a store's facts easy for AI assistants and AI search to find, trust and quote. For New Canaan Farms, that meant written answers to shoppers' questions, Nutrition Facts as text, ingredients and heat levels stored as data, recipes linked to the products they use, and structured data that labels recipes, questions and store details for search engines.

Can the New Canaan Farms team update the site themselves?

Yes. Questions and answers, nutrition panels, heat ratings, category colors and seasonal landing pages are all edited in Shopify admin or the theme editor, with no code.

Is the new site accessible?

It was built to WCAG 2.2 AA. An automated axe-core check of eight key pages, at desktop and phone widths, found no issues on the live site, down from 56 on the old theme.

From kickoff to launch

  1. First call. The site looks like a bare catalog, traffic comes from social recipes, and the holidays are the deadline.

  2. Kickoff. Two or three homepage concepts first, then the chosen direction carried to product and landing pages.

  3. Theme audit: 44 templates and 68 custom elements. Decision to extend the theme, not rebuild it.

  4. Corporate gifting first, ahead of the September email campaign.

  5. New header, footer and homepage on a private preview theme.

  6. Product and collection templates, the product data model, and every remaining page on the new design.

  7. Weekly client review. Three landing pages, the trust bar and testimonials.

  8. The client's punch list, new photography and the wholesale page.

  9. Launch, the morning New Canaan Farms' announcement email went out. Mobile refinements shipped the same afternoon.

  10. Structured data for search and AI assistants: Recipe markup on all 63 recipes, FAQ markup on every question set, Organization and Store markup, and an llms.txt file.

Live at newcanaanfarms.com

Handcrafted in Utopia

The new site went live on October 13, 2026, in time for the holiday season the whole year builds toward. Up next for New Canaan Farms: a build-your-own gift box and subscription boxes.

  • Client: New Canaan Farms, Utopia, Texas
  • Design and build: Braun Design Co, Austin, Texas
  • Photography: courtesy of New Canaan Farms
  • Stack: Shopify, Ignite theme, Judge.me, Giftship, Faire, Instafeed, Shopify Email
Visit newcanaanfarms.com

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