Chef Ralph's Realm — three businesses on one site. The catering form goes to his phone; YouTube syncs at every build.
A working chef and YouTube creator wanted his catering business, his channel, and a retail shop on a single site that runs itself. Forge built it, then wired auto-sync so the site updates when YouTube does.
“Site syncs my YouTube channel at every build, the catering form goes to my phone, and the shop just works. Forge ships new pages while I'm cooking. I never touch a line of code.”
What we were asked to do.
Ralph runs a catering business, films a YouTube cooking show, and operates a small retail shop selling sauces and apparel. He needed all three discoverable from a single domain without juggling three CMSes. The work-order: ingest YouTube as the build's data source, route the catering form to SMS, and host the shop without Stripe + Shopify spaghetti.
Week 1 — the rebuild
- →Astro static rebuild on chefralphtorrell.com with a build-time YouTube ingestion step — new uploads appear at the next nightly deploy
- →Catering inquiry form routed through the Forge form-handler Worker → Discord + SMS to Ralph's phone, no email gymnastics
- →Retail shop on the same domain with Stripe Checkout direct (no third-party platform)
- →Schema.org BroadcastEvent + VideoObject for every YouTube upload, so episodes are eligible for Google video rich results
Every night since
- →Latest YouTube videos refreshed at every nightly build (cached YouTube Data API call → regenerated static page)
- →Recipe + episode landing pages spawned when new videos are detected and Google starts surfacing them
- →Meta + Open Graph rewrites when impressions climb but clicks stall
- →Performance budgets enforced — site stays under 1.5s LCP even as the catalog grows
Ralph hasn't touched the site since the rebuild. The YouTube channel feeds it; the catering form lands on his phone; the shop ships orders. He cooks; the site runs.
Other shops Forge runs.
One conversation. One week to live.
Tell us about your shop and we'll come back with a one-page work order inside 24 hours.