Scaling a foodtech DTC brand from MVP to profitability

Twistag built the direct-to-consumer subscription platform behind Kencko, a European foodtech brand that reached an $85M valuation at Series B and has shipped more than 12 million cold-pressed smoothies across six countries. Kencko came to Twistag as a three-person founding team with a category that did not yet exist and a runway that did. Twistag built a subscription engine on Node.js, React, AWS and Stripe, and — separately — an operations dashboard Kencko's own team ran without calling an engineer. The first order shipped four months after kickoff, Kencko raised its Series A within eighteen months, and the platform carried six years of business-model change with no rebuild.

Kencko's founders believed cold-pressed juice could reach customers on subscription the way coffee-of-the-month clubs had, but without the logistics overhead. The category did not exist, so there was no platform to buy. The first hurdle was not supply chain and it was not product — it was software that could carry subscription economics: recurring payments, personalised ordering, customer retention, inventory forecasting across a growing SKU count, and the operational workflows needed to actually ship fresh juice every week. Building in-house meant hiring an engineering team the company could not yet afford, on a timeline that would have consumed the runway. Kencko arrived with three founders and one ask: build the platform fast enough to prove product-market fit before capital runs out.

Twistag built Kencko's DTC platform on Node.js and React, with AWS for infrastructure and Stripe for payments, and made two architectural commitments up front. First, a subscription engine designed to adapt rather than to be correct once — customer cohorts, flavour rotations, gifting and corporate accounts were all anticipated as shapes the engine would need to take, not as features to bolt on later.

Second, and more consequentially, a separate operational surface. The customer-facing subscription product and the internal operations dashboard were built as two independent interfaces, so Kencko's operations team could manage inventory, pause and resume subscriptions, run retention campaigns and manage cohorts without Twistag in the loop. That separation is what let the company grow from three people to fifty without the platform becoming the bottleneck. AWS handles fulfilment orchestration out to regional fulfilment partners.

Over six years the platform moved through three phases — MVP with subscription and recurring billing; scale with cohort management, gifting, corporate accounts and B2B logistics; then profitability with delivery route planning and inventory forecasting — each shipped when the business demanded it rather than when a roadmap predicted it. Kencko arrived as three founders with a runway rather than a platform, so the sequencing question was which decisions had to be right immediately and which could be deferred. Twistag treated the subscription engine's shape as the irreversible decision and everything else as reversible, which is why six years of business-model change never required a rebuild.

Stack: Node.js, React, AWS, Stripe. Services: Product engineering, e-commerce and subscription platform engineering, operations tooling.

Kencko shipped its first customer order four months after Twistag started work. The company proved subscription retention in the cold-pressed juice category and raised its Series A within eighteen months. By the time Series B closed at an $85M valuation, the platform had delivered twelve million smoothies across six countries, with no rebuild along the way. When fulfilment partners changed, the orchestration layer absorbed it. When corporate gifting became a revenue line, the subscription engine handled it. When unit economics demanded route optimisation, the platform supported an analytics layer without a rewrite.

The platform survives because it was built to adapt, not to solve the problem once.