From Food to Pharma to Industrial: How Coldcart Built Portfolio Stability Across Three Markets

From Food to Pharma to Industrial: How Coldcart Built Portfolio Stability Across Three Markets

Your startup mentor probably told you to focus. Pick one vertical. Own one market. Never dilute your message by serving disparate industries simultaneously.

Jason Park ignored that advice completely.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Park, CEO of Coldcart, explained how his company simultaneously serves meal kit subscriptions, temperature-controlled pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemical shipments. On paper, this looks like catastrophic lack of focus. In practice, it’s portfolio theory applied to B2B infrastructure—and it might be the smartest strategic decision the company made.

The Conventional Wisdom on Vertical Focus

The startup playbook is clear: focus wins. Pick a tight ICP, dominate one vertical, then expand. This advice works for good reasons. Focused companies develop deep domain expertise. Their marketing message resonates clearly. Sales teams become experts in one buyer persona. Product roadmaps align to specific use cases.

Serving multiple disparate verticals typically creates the opposite. Diluted messaging that resonates with nobody. Sales teams that lack deep expertise in any domain. Product development pulled in conflicting directions by different customer needs.

So when Jason describes Coldcart’s market as roughly split into thirds—food, pharmaceuticals, and industrials—the natural reaction is concern. These aren’t adjacent markets. They’re completely different industries with different buyers, regulations, and use cases.

But Jason’s framing reveals why this criticism misses the point: “These markets each have their own kind of dynamics, which really makes for a very kind of balanced portfolio.”

Portfolio. Not market segments. Not customer categories. Portfolio.

The Shared Infrastructure That Enables Diversification

The key to understanding Coldcart’s strategy is recognizing what’s actually shared versus what’s different across verticals. Most companies diversify by building different products for different markets. Coldcart built one infrastructure platform that solves the identical underlying problem across seemingly unrelated industries.

“We know through lots and lots of validation and insiders and direct observation, et cetera, that the need and the problem is exactly the same, because you are trying to put ice into a box and you are trying to ensure that box survives up to two days transportation and do that without massive costs,” Jason explains.

This is the crucial insight. A meal kit company shipping grass-fed beef and a pharmaceutical distributor shipping insulin face identical logistics challenges: keep products cold, minimize spoilage, optimize costs, ensure on-time delivery. The products are different. The physics are the same.

This shared infrastructure foundation enables diversification without dilution. Coldcart doesn’t build separate platforms for food versus pharma. They built one platform that optimizes the cost-spoilage trade-off, then apply it across industries with identical underlying physics but different business dynamics.

Why Different Risk Profiles Create Stability

The portfolio framing becomes strategic when you understand how these verticals respond to different external forces. They’re not just large markets—they’re large markets with uncorrelated risk profiles.

Food, particularly direct-to-consumer meal subscriptions, has strong demographic tailwinds. “Millennials now have multiple kids and use at least one or two of these services as part of their weekly meal routine,” Jason notes. This category grows with generational shifts and family formation patterns. Since 2015, it’s been “growing by 18% roughly every year. And very consistently and actually very linearly.”

Pharmaceuticals offer something different: inelastic demand. “People have to take their medications,” Jason explains simply. Economic downturns don’t reduce pharmaceutical shipments. Consumer sentiment shifts don’t matter. This vertical provides stability that consumer categories can’t match.

Industrial applications represent mission-critical infrastructure. When manufacturing plants need specific chemicals or solvents to operate, delays don’t just inconvenience consumers—they halt production entirely. “As you go from food to pharma to industrial, you get into increasingly mission critical applications and use cases,” Jason observes.

This creates portfolio stability that single-vertical companies cannot achieve. Economic recession? Pharmaceutical and industrial shipments remain stable even as consumer discretionary spending declines. Demographic shifts? Food delivery grows while pharma remains steady. Regulatory changes in healthcare? Industrial and food verticals continue unaffected.

The Market Size Reality Check

The diversification strategy also addresses a common startup trap: overestimating addressable market in a single vertical. Many founders target what seems like a massive market, only to discover the truly addressable segment is much smaller once you account for actual buyer behavior and willingness to adopt new solutions.

Coldcart’s approach sidesteps this by acknowledging that “pharma and industrial are actually meaningfully larger than food.” Food gets consumer attention and press coverage, but the pharmaceutical and industrial markets dwarf it in actual spending.

The total addressable market is staggering: “$76 billion worth of spend on just warehousing, shipping and packaging on perishable parcels in the US last year.” But rather than betting everything on one third of that market, Coldcart can pursue all three simultaneously because the same platform serves each.

This creates optionality. If growth in one vertical stalls, the company can shift resources to others. If regulatory changes favor one vertical, they can capitalize quickly. If a vertical consolidates through M&A, reducing customer count, other verticals cushion the impact.

The Go-to-Market Complexity Trade-Off

Jason acknowledges that serving multiple verticals isn’t free. “As you go from one vertical to another, the selling message changes, the groups of customers change, and how you reach them changes.”

This is the real cost of diversification. You can’t just copy-paste your sales playbook across industries. Meal kit founders don’t attend the same conferences as pharmaceutical executives. The buying process for industrial chemicals involves different stakeholders than D2C food brands.

But Jason frames this as “incremental, solvable, go to market and product, just work that you need to do.” It’s not strategic complexity—it’s execution work. The difference matters. Strategic complexity means solving fundamentally different problems that require different capabilities. Execution complexity means adapting a proven solution to different buyer contexts.

Pharmaceuticals add specific requirements like HIPAA compliance. “In your case of pharma in particular, you have HIPAA regulations,” Jason notes. But Coldcart was fortunate: “Everyone on our engineering team used to work in healthcare for a completely kind of just coincidence. And so we do know that space well.”

These vertical-specific requirements create barriers to entry that strengthen moats. Competitors can’t easily serve all three verticals because each has unique regulatory or domain expertise requirements. But for Coldcart, having solved these once, they become durable advantages rather than recurring costs.

When Multi-Vertical Strategy Makes Sense

Not every company should pursue Coldcart’s approach. The decision framework requires specific conditions.

You’re building horizontal infrastructure, not vertical solutions. If your product solves fundamentally different problems in each vertical, you’re building multiple companies. If you’re solving the same problem with vertical-specific adaptations, you’re building portfolio stability.

The underlying physics or economics are identical. Coldcart works because meal kits and medications face identical logistics challenges. The products differ, but the optimization problem is the same.

Your verticals have uncorrelated risk profiles. The portfolio benefit only works if different verticals respond differently to external forces. Three verticals that all suffer in recessions provide no diversification benefit.

Vertical-specific requirements create barriers, not rebuild requirements. HIPAA compliance is work, but it doesn’t require rebuilding the platform. If each vertical requires fundamental product changes, you’re building multiple products, not one platform with adaptations.

You have credible entry points in multiple verticals. Coldcart could serve pharmaceuticals because their engineering team had healthcare backgrounds. Without domain credibility in each vertical, the GTM complexity overwhelms the benefits.

The Compounding Effect of Cross-Vertical Data

Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of Coldcart’s multi-vertical approach is how it strengthens the core network effect. More verticals means more shipments, which means more data, which means better optimization for everyone.

A carrier having issues in New York affects meal kits, pharmaceuticals, and industrial shipments simultaneously. By serving all three, Coldcart detects the pattern faster and reroutes more effectively. Weather patterns that impact food spoilage also affect temperature-sensitive medications. The data compounds across verticals.

This creates a moat that single-vertical competitors cannot match. Even if a competitor focuses exclusively on pharmaceutical logistics and executes perfectly, they’ll have less data and worse optimization than Coldcart’s aggregated intelligence across all three verticals.

The Strategic Patience Required

Jason’s approach required patience that most founders lack. Building credibility across three different verticals takes time. Developing vertical-specific expertise in regulations, buyer behavior, and go-to-market channels is incremental work that doesn’t show up in monthly growth metrics.

But the payoff is a business that’s structurally more resilient than single-vertical competitors. When asked about the revenue split five years out, Jason doesn’t predict one vertical dominating. Instead, he emphasizes the balance: these markets “each have their own kind of dynamics, which really makes for a very kind of balanced portfolio.”

That balance isn’t a bug. It’s the entire strategy. While competitors chase growth in whichever vertical is hottest, Coldcart builds durable infrastructure that serves all three equally well. When market conditions shift, they’re already positioned to capitalize without pivot risk.

Most founders hear “focus” and think narrow. Jason heard “focus” and built focused infrastructure serving diversified markets. The difference between distraction and portfolio theory comes down to whether you’re building multiple solutions or one platform with multiple applications.