MohnMercantile · A Mohn Empire platform
The software this industry got stuck with was built in 1998. We built the replacement.
MohnMercantile comes out of NeighborTechs, a Virginia software shop that spent its time inside a real beverage warehouse — watching freight get staged, watching the office walk back and forth to a PC to check a case count, watching stores call in the same order every week because the online portal was too stale to trust.
What we kept seeing
A distributor runs a tight physical operation — trucks loaded in sequence, drivers who know their customers, an office that knows every account by first name. Then you look at the software: a terminal interface from another era, a per-seat license bill that goes up every year, a retailer portal half the accounts refuse to use, and a dispatcher rerouting trucks from memory when someone calls out. The warehouse deserved better than it was being sold.
What we actually built
One system where the store places the order, the warehouse gets a pick list, the driver scans it onto the truck, delivers it against a signature and a photo, and the owner watches the whole thing from a dashboard — with nothing re-keyed, nothing phoned in, and nothing lost between departments. Every screen was prototyped against the real workflow first. If a feature required the warehouse to change how it loaded a truck, it didn't ship.
The stack is the same one used at enterprise scale — Next.js, Firebase, Mapbox, Stripe — deployed lean enough that a whole platform costs less per month than a single legacy license seat. That gap between what legacy vendors charge and what modern infrastructure costs is, frankly, most of the business case.
Where this goes
Beverage is where it started because that's where we were standing. But nothing about a pick ticket, a route manifest, or a POD signature is beverage-specific — the same platform runs grocery, snacks, janitorial, auto parts, hardware, pharmacy, and anything else that gets warehoused, picked, delivered, and invoiced. Alcohol and regulated-goods compliance — licenses, state rules, COD enforcement — is Phase 2, and the engine for it is already in the codebase.
What a pilot looks like
We set up a demo tenant on your real catalog — your products, your customers, your route structure — usually in days, not months. Your warehouse keeps working the way it works; the paper and the phone calls are what disappear. No contracts, no per-seat licenses, and your data stays yours if you ever walk.