Food & Beverage: POAS, COGS and margin benchmarks
Food and beverage brands sell modest baskets of consumable, often perishable products. In Triple Whale's Google Ads benchmarks, the median food and beverage order was $71.39 over the year to July 2026, while the median cost of acquiring a customer rose 14.45%. Picking, packing, cold-chain packaging and spoilage decide whether each of those orders makes money, and none of them appear in ROAS. The pages below cover what a healthy return looks like, why basket size matters more than ROAS suggests, what belongs in a food brand's cost of goods, and how to scale spend without buying smaller and smaller orders.
The questions, with sourced numbers
- What's a healthy POAS?
What POAS food, beverage and CPG stores need on Google Ads when small baskets carry fixed fulfilment and cold-chain costs on every order.
3.18Median Google Ads ROAS - Why does optimising for ROAS overspend?
Why food and beverage brands overspend on ROAS: small orders carry fixed fulfilment costs that revenue-based bidding ignores.
$71.39Median order value, Google Ads - What counts as COGS?
Ingredients, co-packing, packaging, insulation and spoilage: which food and beverage costs belong in COGS when measuring POAS on Google Ads.
76.77%COGS as a share of revenue - How do you scale spend profitably?
How to scale Google Ads for a food and beverage brand on profit: raise basket size first, exclude single-unit orders, and plan around gifting seasons.
$23.65Median Google Ads cost per acquisition
Background reading
- What Is POAS (Profit on Ad Spend)? Full Definition
- ROAS vs POAS: Which Metric Should You Actually Use?
- ROAS vs POAS: The Metric Killing Your Shopify Profits
- How to Calculate Break-Even ROAS (With a Worked Example)
- Shopify COGS Setup: How to Track Cost of Goods Sold
- Google Ads for Shopify: The Complete Profitability Guide
- Wasted Ad Spend in Google Ads: How to Find and Fix It