How immi Took Its DTC-Famous Ramen Into National Retail with Jampack AI

Over the past few years, a defining shift has reshaped how CPG brands grow: the DTC darlings are going to retail. Rising customer acquisition costs, maturing online audiences, and retailers actively courting emerging brands have pushed founders toward a channel they once bypassed entirely—and what was once a bold strategic move has quietly become the category norm. But retail also means a completely different operational reality—one that most DTC teams weren't built for and don't see coming until they're already in it.

When a DTC brand launches in retail, ops transform overnight into something of a behemoth. So, we spoke with the supply chain team at immi—the better-for-you instant ramen brand that went from a sold-out cult DTC launch to shelves at Whole Foods, Wegmans, Sprouts, and The Fresh Market—to hear the ops story behind their DTC-to-retail growth, and why a platform called Jampack AI became one of the most useful tools in their stack.

"Jampack has completely changed how I think about ops leverage. It saves our team hours of back-and-forth, gives energy back because we're not constantly chasing details, and gives me much more confidence that the function is actually under control."

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The Setup

immi was born from the brains (and shared frustrations) of two friends named Kevin—Kevin Lee and Kevin Chanthasiriphan—met at the same tech company a decade ago and bonded over a shared noodle habit—both grew up inside food families, Lee's in Taiwan, Chanthasiriphan's in Thailand, where ramen and its cousins were staples. When they both watched family members struggle with diet-related health conditions, they started asking what a better version of the food they loved could look like.

They went full-time in 2019 on an answer to that question: instant ramen that was high-protein, low-carb, and plant-based. Industry contacts told them it was "kind of impossible," so like any hungry founder, they reformulated it in their own kitchens until it wasn't.

immi launched in 2021, immediately sold out, and raised a $3.8M seed then a $10M Series A—with a stacked cap table including Naomi Osaka, Usher, and Apolo Ohno.

The brand grew up DTC-first, a cult product before it ever touched a retail shelf. The back end ran on a spreadsheet for most of that journey… but the strain came from everything retail piled on top of it.

From DTC → Retail

A DTC operation is built for Shopify and Amazon, where the platform catches the order for you. But, as the immi ops team quickly learned, retail is a different beast:

• The retailer hands you a PO and a list of requirements
• Someone has to read it, copy the SKUs into a tracker, reformat them into a warehouse file
• Then they have to route the whole thing to the 3PL

At immi, that process ran about ten minutes per order. On a heavy day, that's most of a workday. "Our spreadsheet was getting bigger and clunkier," said Silas Ang, Director of Operations at immi.

The team are Excel optimizers by instinct, so the bar for a new tool was high. But when a platform called Jampack AI promised to do the most tedious parts faster, they decided to give it a shot. A few months in, here's how that played out:

POs now flow into Jampack the moment they arrive and sync to the wholesale tracker in a single click.

Because that data carries straight through to booking, nobody re-enters an address by hand anymore—rendering data-entry errors obsolete.

And since every PO is tracked from the second it lands to the second it ships, an open or unshipped order is visible at a glance instead of buried in a thread someone has to monitor all week, something that has saved the team countless hours.

The Unexpected Favorite Feature

For a brand where freight is a real line in the cost of getting product to a customer, the most valuable thing Jampack does is let immi shop for it.

Silas has spent about eight years in this industry, and was growing frustrated with the old way of rate shopping for freight: emailing brokers one at a time to explain the load and request prices, then waiting and comparing by hand.

The problem: no two brokers price the same, because each carries different carrier contracts. Doing that comparison manually, every shipment, is how a small team bleeds hours and margin simultaneously.

In Jampack, onboarded brokers share live rates in the platform, all at one glance. The team sorts cheapest to most expensive in one view and books. With the rate-shopping feature, Silas told us, "you can make a decision in seconds."

The Perks

There's a default rule in operations: orders go up, headcount goes up. Silas has lived that pattern at other companies, and Jampack is what lets immi step off it. When the repetitive work compresses, the team can absorb more volume without adding salaries.

"It honestly feels like it turns one ops person into five people."

A Partner, Not Just a Platform

One of immi's favorite things about Jampack is that they've felt less like a vendor, and more like a member of the team. "If I see that I need this particular feature, they're very open to it—and then they can really give us what we need," said Silas.

As volume grows and the repetitive work stays compressed, the team can finally tackle what always got deferred—better broker deals, tiered MOQs, the strategic layer that used to lose out to copy-paste. As Silas put it: "You can't fix the car while you're driving it." Jampack is what let them pull over.

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