100% Order Automation Across 3 Warehouses
How a 150-year-old ice cream company unified three warehouses, eliminated manual dry ice calculations, and achieved 100% order automation.
Before & After SkuNexus
The transformation at a glance
About Graeter’s Ice Cream
Founded in 1870, Graeter’s is one of America’s most beloved artisan ice cream brands. They still use the French Pot process, which yields just 2.5 gallons per batch. It’s the kind of company that refuses to sacrifice quality for speed. That philosophy built a brand with over 50 retail locations across five states and pints in thousands of grocery stores nationwide.
The Challenge
By 2017, Graeter’s eCommerce operation had outpaced their back-end systems. They were shipping more than 250,000 pints a year through their Magento store, and the cracks were impossible to ignore.
Three separate warehouses were operating with no information flow between them. Stock levels were siloed. The team had no way to view a single order’s lifecycle from intake to delivery. And every shipment of frozen goods required someone to manually calculate the dry ice needed based on the destination, the weather, the package size, and the transit time.
For a company shipping perishable ice cream with strict cold-chain requirements, one wrong dry ice calculation means a melted product on a customer’s doorstep. Multiply that by thousands of daily decisions, and you understand why Graeter’s leadership decided they needed a completely different approach.
“I was starting every morning going through orders manually. Our packers were calculating dry ice weights by hand on every single shipment. At our volume, that wasn’t sustainable.”
Jaclyn Von SteinDirector of eCommerce & Technology, Graeter’s Ice Cream
Why SkuNexus
Graeter’s didn’t need a generic order management tool. They needed a system that could handle automated dry ice calculations per order size, IATA-compliant shipping labels with perishable item dates and certification stickers, wave picking for temperature-sensitive batches, and intelligent routing across three locations.
Multiple engineers recommended they contact SkuNexus based on software design, flexibility, and out-of-the-box functionality. The deciding factor was source code access. Because SkuNexus provides full access to the codebase, the Graeter’s implementation wasn’t a compromise between what they needed and what the software allowed. The custom dry ice logic, the IATA compliance automation, the rotating warehouse configurations — none of it required waiting for a vendor to build a feature or being told “that’s not on our roadmap.” It was built to match their operations exactly.
“I love being able to customize so many aspects of the software to our exact needs.”
The Implementation
Seamless Magento Integration
Orders import automatically from the Magento eCommerce platform into SkuNexus, triggering the fulfillment workflow instantly. No manual data entry between systems. No copy-paste. No lag.
Automated Dry Ice Calculations
This was the operational centerpiece. SkuNexus’s Shipping Option Mappers were configured with custom logic that determines the exact amount of dry ice needed per order based on package size, shipping method, destination zone, and transit time. The calculations that previously consumed hours of manual work each day now happen automatically for every shipment, with zero human input.
Custom Shipping Labels with Built-In Compliance
Every label automatically includes IATA certification stickers, dry ice weight declarations, and perishable item date stamps. The shipping method — Next Day Air versus one- or two-day ground — is selected automatically based on distance and transit requirements. Compliance isn’t a checklist item that warehouse staff have to remember. It’s built into the label itself.
Intelligent Order Routing
Orders automatically route to the optimal warehouse based on real-time inventory levels, geographic proximity to the customer, and shipping constraints. What used to be a rigid, manual process is now a dynamic decision made by the system for every single order.
Role-Based Workflows
Instead of every employee having the same access and the same manual process, specific roles were assigned with custom workflows from receiving through shipping. The right people see the right information at the right time.
The full system was built, tested, and live in time for the 2017 holiday season.
The Results
Since implementation, SkuNexus has become Graeter’s system of record — the single trusted data source for all eCommerce operations across all three warehouse locations.
100% order automation. Every order is now processed automatically from intake to label generation. Zero manual touches. Zero bottlenecks.
Shipping volume doubled. Annual pint shipments grew from 270,000 at the time of implementation to a sustained level above 550,000 — without adding operational headcount for order processing.
Dry ice compliance eliminated as a risk. Every shipment gets the right amount of dry ice based on real shipping data, not a human’s best guess. No more melted product. No more manual spreadsheets.
Real-time inventory accuracy. Stock levels are reflected across all three warehouses in real time, eliminating the stock-outs and routing errors that plagued the previous system.
“The increase in processing speed on importing orders into SkuNexus and generating UPS labels has been critical. Plus, with the software being so user-friendly, our employees can easily problem-solve themselves. I no longer have to start my mornings going through orders.”
8 Years and Still Building
What makes the Graeter’s partnership different from a typical software implementation is that it didn’t end at go-live. Over eight years, Graeter’s has continued adding customizations as their operations have evolved.
Rotating Warehouse Configurations
Graeter’s rotates inventory locations and warehouse layout on a monthly basis to maximize space utilization. SkuNexus’s directed putaway and pick lists keep warehouse staff automatically up-to-date with the current configuration — no retraining needed when things move.
Wave Picking Optimization
Automated group pick lists ensure like items with similar shipping requirements are picked together, improving efficiency and keeping the warehouse running on schedule.
Custom Unboxing Experience
Shipping labels now include personalized gift cards. The pick list, gift card, and shipping label are combined into a single document, reducing errors and improving the customer experience.
Bulk Reship Capability
A unique disaster-response function was built for severe weather events or carrier failures. When a delivery truck full of ice cream gets stuck in a blizzard, Graeter’s can mass-reship every affected order in minutes instead of hours.
Graeter’s is now opening a new fulfillment center built around SkuNexus to support the eCommerce sales volume that has grown more than 100% since 2017.
“SkuNexus took our processes to the next level! Using its automations for shipping and fulfillment, we have seen massive improvement in our order handling and fulfillment. We’re looking forward to even more improvements this year!”
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