Freshline

Before Freshline, there was Coastline Market - North America's first demand-driven seafood marketplace. We started in 2016 with a simple idea: connect fishermen directly to restaurants and consumers, cutting out the middlemen that made seafood expensive and opaque.

Coastline grew quickly. We built relationships with fishing boats up and down the Pacific Coast, partnered with hundreds of restaurants across Vancouver and Seattle, and scaled to 7-figure revenues. We were accepted into Techstars Seattle 2017, made it to the Thiel Fellowship Summit as one of 50 finalists from 3,000 applicants, and raised from some incredible investors.

The press loved the story. We were featured in Forbes, Globe and Mail, Financial Post, Geekwire, and more. The model was working - we were proving that transparency in seafood supply chains wasn't just possible, it was profitable.

Then March 2020 happened. In a single week, we lost 90% of our revenue. Restaurants - our core customers - shut down overnight. The business we'd spent four years building was suddenly existential.

But we noticed something. Our wholesale partners - the distributors who supplied restaurants with everything from produce to dairy to seafood - were drowning. They were still using fax machines and phone calls to take orders. Their customers were shifting to online ordering for the first time, and they had no tools to handle it.

We had two choices: wind down or pivot. We chose to pivot. Within weeks, we rebuilt our platform from a consumer-facing marketplace into a B2B e-commerce solution for food distributors. We took everything we learned about building great digital experiences for food and applied it to a $300B+ industry that was still operating like it was 1995.

Freshline became the e-commerce platform we wished existed when we were running Coastline. It handles everything a food distributor needs: online ordering, inventory management, route optimization, and customer communication.

The platform now serves wholesalers across North America, helping them modernize their operations without the six-figure price tags of legacy enterprise software. We built it to be simple enough that a 60-year-old butcher shop owner could set it up, but powerful enough to handle millions in monthly order volume.