Grip taps industry veteran to lead cold chain fulfillment

“I’ve known Juan since his ButcherBox days, and I’ve followed Grip’s journey ever since,” Hummel said. “Joining the team to lead its fulfillment operation is an incredible opportunity.”

Grip has shipped more than $3 billion in perishable goods since launching in 2022. Fulfillment centers in New Jersey, Texas, Michigan, Nevada and Florida reach more than 80% of the U.S. population within 24 hours, and the rest of the country within 48.

Why Cold Chain Fulfillment Stayed Fragmented

Founder and CEO Juan Camilo Meisel was on the early team at ButcherBox, which he helped scale past $500 million, before starting Grip in 2022. The opening he saw was not consumer demand. It was the distance between that demand and the infrastructure serving it.

“Consumer behavior had changed. People now know that they can buy refrigerated and frozen items online and you also have all these beautiful brands popping up, but in the middle you have a fragmented industry,” Meisel told FreightWaves.

The facilities that existed were built for pallets moving to grocery shelves, not parcels moving to porches. “So you have multiple pallet-in, pallet-out facilities on one end where you have to work with multiple providers to get a good nationwide coverage,” Meisel said. “And it’s also just providers that are not designed for e-commerce or CPG products.”

The software layer sat just as far from the freight. “And then you have also someone else managing technology that is just not connected to what you’re seeing and what you do on the ground,” he said.

The Dry Ice Math

Grip’s answer was an order management system built for perishables rather than adapted from dry goods. An OMS for perishable e-commerce has to set origin, refrigerant type, refrigerant weight, insulation, carrier and service level on every single order.

“It’s a thinking software because behind it it’s making all these decisions for the final user,” Meisel said.

The alternative is what Meisel calls flat logic, and he says it fails in both directions.

“You could say, ‘Hey, I’m going to ship every single one of my boxes that takes two days to get to the final customer with 10 pounds of dry ice.’ That’s a flat logic,” he said. “But the reality is that there’s a specific box that will be benefited by having 15 pounds and not 10 because you would be improving the end customer experience. You would be reducing waste and you would be increasing your lifetime value.”

The reverse is just as common. “The same order that the flat logic would require 10 pounds of dry ice can actually ship with five while maintaining high quality,” Meisel said. “Which as you know in shipping every single pound matters.”

Grip says the system reduces brand shipping costs by up to 30% and lowers shipping failures by 25%. Meisel puts the all-in number higher.

“We’ve seen savings as much as 30-40% of how much our customers were spending before working with us,” he said. “And it’s all accumulated … what percentage of the country can you cover in one day in transit versus two day in transit as well because you see different damage rates for those two.”

Why a Career Operator Matters

“It’s things that are crucial for humans, crucial for people. It’s things that people are feeding their families with,” Meisel said. “And there just needs to be a super high standard of quality that comes down to the actual operation that you have on the ground, but then also all the technology and traceability of how you’re orchestrating that internally.”

“John has spent nearly four decades building world-class cold-chain operations and understands this business at every level,” Meisel said. “As we continue investing in our fulfillment operation, his leadership and operational expertise will help us deliver even greater value to our customers.”

Where Grip Grows Next

Growth will not come from planting flags. Grip reaches 80% of the country in a day, and Meisel says chasing the remainder would cost his customers more than it returns.

“Optimizing for that extra one or 2% is pretty challenging,” he said. “You don’t necessarily want to do that because then you also split your customers’ inventory too much.”

That leaves depth inside the existing five regions, plus software, as the path Hummel inherits.

“We have been expanding capacity within the regions that we’ve been at for the last couple years non-stop and we’re going to keep doing that for the next couple years as well,” Meisel said. “So we’re head down building technology. We build technology pretty fast … So that compounding with just increased quality and throughput from our facilities is the next phase for us.”

Meisel’s broader thesis is that the category grows because the barrier to entry falls and product trends push the same direction. “You also have just the trend of things moving more into the natural space that means that the product requires more refrigeration, either just frozen or refrigerated,” he said.

Why it matters: Perishable D2C shipping remains one of the hardest and most expensive problems in e-commerce. By pairing its AI-driven order system with a 40-year cold-chain operator, Grip is trying to turn a fragmented, high-failure category into more reliable infrastructure and lower the barrier for brands selling frozen and refrigerated products direct.