Mercury Foodservice

For nearly two years, mwfoods.ca showed a single scrolling truck GIF under an "Under Construction" banner. The WordPress install underneath had been abandoned since 2020. Long-time restaurant accounts placing orders by phone had no working web presence to point new staff at, and no way for prospective customers to verify what the business actually carried. On top of that, the site had to hold up under an ownership transition without republishing the previous owner's personal story — which is exactly what the old, still-cached WordPress About page did.

Ground-up Next.js rebuild with real photography over stock: warehouse floor, delivery truck in the alley, team at the order counter, real product packshots on the shelf. A recovered 289-SKU archive from the abandoned WordPress install (a 2020 PDF sitting untouched in wp-content/uploads) grounded the vendor and category structure. Vendor names put on the record on the product page (Armstrong, Venetian Meats, E.D. Smith, Big Red, Nador Moulin Rouge, Lynch Foods) so accounts-payable clerks could confirm carriage without a phone call. Written in the trade voice — plain, regional, phone-first — with an "Est. 1993 · Hamilton, ON" deli-stamp treatment and a full brand guidelines PDF shipped as a v1 deliverable.

Live at mwfoods.ca on real client photography — the first working trade-facing web presence in two years. Content sourced from a client-tracked open TODO list; every unconfirmed fact rendered as a visible placeholder rather than an assertion until the owner confirmed it. Phase 2 is currently in build: vendor listing and SKU-level catalog tables that will let long-time accounts self-serve product confirmation. Alyssa Outerson's testimonial arrived over email during the review pass.