Remember when every new startup was about shipping you things in a box once a month for a small monthly fee? Well, some of them are still around — like Love With Food, which is focused on sending boxes of healthy snacks to subscribers once a month and just raised $1.4 million in funding.
The new funding for Love With Food brings the total amount raised to just over $2 million and comes from a group of investors that includes Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, TEEC Angel Fund, Angel List Syndicate led by Yun-Fang Juan, Ironfire Capital, Scrum Ventures, Tom Peterson of El Dorado Ventures, and Talmadge O’Neill of Juvo Capital.
Love With Food has a simple concept — you pay $10 a month and you get a box full of snacks. If you like the snacks, you can learn more about them on the company’s website and even order more of them. It’s basically applying the Birchbox subscription commerce model to food, and providing organic or natural snacks to customers.
Each of its regular boxes has between six and eight snacks each, and the company recently introduced a Deluxe Box for $20 a month. And with each box, the company also donates a portion of the proceeds to fight childhood hunger in the U.S.
Right now, the company makes about 60 percent of its revenues from sales of its subscription boxes, with another 20 percent coming from sales of goodies that happen on its website, as subscribers go beyond samples to buy full-size packages of goodies they’ve enjoyed.
But ultimately, the bigger opportunity could come from the data it collects for the consumer packaged goods companies that make samples available in its boxes. That’s a business that continues to grow, as Love With Food can show how its subscribers react to the snacks they get in each box.
Through social media analytics as well as surveys that it provides to subscribers, Love With Food can tell its partners which snacks are resonating with customers. As a result, brands like General Mills, Nestlé, SoyJoy, and Lindt Chocolates have been using the platform to market to new customers and get feedback.