The Story of Coldcart: Building Infrastructure for a $76 Billion Problem Nobody Could Solve

The Story of Coldcart: Building Infrastructure for a $76 Billion Problem Nobody Could Solve

The question seemed simple enough: how did Blue Apron figure out how to ship boxes of vegetables to people’s apartments without everything going bad?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Park, CEO of Coldcart, traced the origin of his company back to this exact curiosity. Years after Blue Apron’s $2 billion IPO, Jason reconnected with his Harvard friend Matt Salzberg, who had founded the meal kit pioneer. The answer to his question would lead to building an entirely new category of software.

When a Head-Scratcher Becomes a Market Opportunity

Jason’s path to Coldcart wound through seemingly unrelated territory. He spent half his early career managing physical warehouse operations at McMaster-Carr, a B2B e-commerce fulfillment company, and the other half on software and automation projects. Then came consulting at Bain during the cloud computing revolution of the early 2010s.

“The big thing happening in tech and to tech companies was the cloud, quote unquote,” Jason recalls. He watched companies transition “from having giant physical server boxes and data centers that companies didn’t really understand…to a world in which we sign up for an Amazon Web Services AWS account and all that centralized in a way that’s more efficient than any of these individual companies can achieve on their own.”

After consulting, Jason joined Allstate to start their consumer identity protection business, taking it from zero to $100 million in about five years. That’s when he reconnected with Matt.

Blue Apron was doing about a billion in revenue, and Jason finally asked the question that had always puzzled him. Matt’s answer was stark: “It was prohibitively hard.” But the reason it was hard revealed the opportunity. “The way you describe it is always just too much overhead, too much infrastructure, too much specialization.”

Jason connected the dots immediately. This was the same phenomenon that happened in the tech industry—infrastructure that was too expensive and complex for individual companies to manage efficiently, waiting for centralization.

The Brutal Mathematics of Perishable Shipping

The market Jason and Matt identified was massive and growing fast. “Last year there were 3 billion of these parcels shipped in the US, and that number is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2032,” Jason explains. Yet despite this scale, the category had been completely overlooked, falling through the cracks between traditional e-commerce and cold chain logistics.

The core problem isn’t just difficult—it’s paradoxical. “You can’t just lower costs. You have to solve for cost and spoilage at the same time. And the more you improve one, the worse the other one gets,” Jason notes. This creates an impossible trade-off that even the largest companies cannot escape through scale alone.

The impact on businesses is devastating. Companies routinely refund 5-10% of sales due to late deliveries and spoilage. But the real damage runs deeper. “The customer lifetime value impact of one late order is anywhere from three to seven future orders,” Jason quantifies. That’s not counting customers who defect entirely, making the true cost incalculable.

For companies in this space, growth becomes self-limiting. “It’s to the point where even the largest companies in the space have to throttle their growth,” Jason explains. You literally cannot scale because the economics break down.

The Network Effect Insight

Coldcart’s breakthrough came from recognizing that the solution required network effects that only work across multiple companies—a counterintuitive insight in logistics, where most optimization happens company by company.

Jason illustrates the dynamic: “1000 companies shipping frozen product in New York City shipping via UPS…UPS is running 85% on time delivery. That’s fine. No alarm bells are going off, no one’s concerned. But those thousand companies are all refunding 15% of their sales because as soon as it delivers late, it’s dead.”

The problem is information asymmetry. Individual companies only learn about carrier issues when they experience failures. But aggregated across many companies, patterns emerge in real-time. “Through cold cards platform, we would see that happening in real time, say across a couple of companies. And then for 998 other companies we would reroute those shipments to ship out of different warehouses.”

The result transforms economics: “For 998 of those companies, their refunds go from 15% to 2%.” Jason notes that “companies are willing to pay $2 or more in every box for that because that is the better economic trade off.”

This optimization is impossible for individual companies to achieve, regardless of size. “It doesn’t matter how big you are, if you’re only working with your own volume, the only way you could even get the data to make a decision like that is because bad things are happening to you.”

The Deliberate Decision to Go Slow

With this insight, most startups would race to market. Coldcart did the opposite, making what Jason calls their most important go-to-market decision: “Almost to not go to market as much in the beginning.”

The reasoning was rooted in category dynamics. Becoming someone’s fulfillment process requires absolute trust. One mistake doesn’t just lose a customer—it destroys their customer relationships. “When we talk about things like minimum viable product, in traditional startup parlance, the bar for minimum viable product is very high in this space.”

So Coldcart operated in paid beta for over a year with just three to four customers at a time. “We had the foundation of the platform, but then we were really building the true capabilities as we were powering these real shipments.”

This restraint created constant tension. “That’s the type of question you sort of wake up in the middle of the night and really agonize about,” Jason admits. Every board meeting brought pressure to accelerate. Investors “understood it, but I could tell it’s one of those where I understand it, I believe the argument, but, boy, I wish we were not just doing it the way I’m used to.”

The gamble paid off. “Now that we’re past that point, the product is enterprise grade, it’s industrial strength, and our product will not be the reason that we cannot grow like it happens with many companies just because you kind of move fast and you got to make some technical compromises and those come back to bite you in meaningful ways later.”

Three Markets, One Infrastructure

As Coldcart scaled, they discovered their platform served three distinct but equally large markets: food, pharmaceuticals, and industrials. “Pharma and industrial are actually meaningfully larger than food,” Jason notes, though food gets more consumer attention.

Each vertical has unique characteristics. Pharmaceuticals offer inelastic demand—people need their medications. Industrial applications involve mission-critical shipments that can shut down manufacturing plants. Food has demographic tailwinds as millennials “now have multiple kids and use at least one or two of these services as part of their weekly meal routine.”

The addressing market is staggering: “$76 billion worth of spend on just warehousing, shipping and packaging on perishable parcels in the US last year.” Yet Jason sees these as portfolio diversification, not just market size. “These markets each have their own kind of dynamics, which really makes for a very kind of balanced portfolio.”

The Future: Infrastructure for an Energy Transition-Scale Market

Looking three to five years ahead, Jason’s vision extends beyond operational metrics to systemic impact. By reducing fulfillment costs by double-digit percentages, Coldcart can unlock entirely new market segments.

“Premium category. Everyone says the premium category, you have to be at least $60 in order just to even be in the category. Who really needs five meals delivered that they can just microwave and eat every week? People who live in food deserts, who don’t have access to a grocery store, where the parents are working multiple minimum wage jobs.”

Currently, these markets are inaccessible because economics don’t work. But “the more you can bring that down, we’re talking double digit percentage reductions on fulfillment of shipping, which is anywhere from 30% to 50% of your sales. So you start to open up these new categories.”

Environmental impact compounds naturally. By optimizing packaging for actual conditions rather than worst-case scenarios, Coldcart reduces packaging waste by up to 20%. By reducing spoilage, they cut food waste at scale.

“If we do our jobs right, cost of business comes down. More people and more businesses can benefit from products that by necessity need to deliver,” Jason explains. “And you actually take a meaningful impact on carbon footprint and waste.”

The ultimate vision is simple but profound: “If we just do our jobs, we will create financial benefits and we will create social, environmental impacts and benefits. And so that’s the nice part about doing this job.”

As the market grows from 3 billion to 9 billion parcels, Coldcart isn’t just building a software platform—they’re building the infrastructure layer for an entirely new category of commerce.