Exotic cuisine in a little box
Photo: Foodist
Want to cook something new and exotic, but even buying the right ingredients seems impossible? No longer. Subscribing to Foodist will take care of everything.
Photo: Shutterstock
Its co-founder, Alexander Djordjević, promises that among the six to eight premium ingredients in the box, which come with a professionally designed magazine featuring their stories, most will be something you would have a hard time finding on the shelves of your local supermarket.
Subscribers to the box of fine culinary products can try a true Macedonian ajvar (pronounced /aɪvɑːr/), organically produced Italian pasta, award-winning Himalayan salt crisps, cardamom tea, or a date balsamic vinegar glaze. Customers with a more active lifestyle can enjoy Foodist’s box of goodies for cooking, baking, or a simple snack.
Foodist’s box is currently only available to subscribers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but could soon delight Slovenian foodies as well.
The surprise snack box is half the price, featuring everything from popcorn to vegetable crisps and protein bars, while Foodist also offers a monthly selection of ingredients to make six cocktails (for 30.90 euros) and a selection of twelve craft beers (for 22.90 euros), aimed at fans of alcoholic beverages.
This exclusive and varied selection of food products is one of Foodist’s most important competitive advantages. They scour the world for the most innovative food products, which allows their customers to constantly discover novelties they might otherwise never come across.
At the same time, they continually provide feedback to the producers on which of the products might be interesting for large retailers. This is because nine out of ten new types of food are generally not well received by the buyers.
»If I see that some product has been popular in London for the last five years, for example, some type of popcorn, and that it is even more popular than crisps, why not try selling it in Germany?« Djordjević asked himself in one of the media interviews, explaining that Foodist put it in their subscription box and shipped to subscribers, whose reaction was incredible. »The very next year, we sold over half a million bags of it.«
The German startup boasts over 10,000 subscribers, and an additional quarter of a million buyers regularly visit their online store.
Foodist has a two-track strategy. We’ve already told you about the goodie boxes from the sphere of the subscription economy. Their other important business channel is their online store, now used by over 250,000 foodies, who can choose from a wide selection of products, from snacks, superfoods, spices, all the way to craft beers and spirits. According to Djordjević, the red thread running through their service is the high quality.
For now, Foodist is available to subscribers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It's expanding into Benelux, and the company is also considering taking their service to consumers in the former Yugoslavian countries, including Slovenia.
Photo: Lana Abie/Unsplash
Even without the expansion, Foodist is currently doing pretty well. Every month, over 10,000 satisfied subscribers receive their boxes of culinary pleasures. »We ensure customers that the purchase value of all the products in the box exceeds 30 euros«, is what the company co-founder Ole Schaumberg, who makes no effort to hide how happy the relatively high margins make him, explains in their pitch video. The price that Foodist pays their suppliers for the six to eight products is around ten euros, which means that the company is making over ten euros in profit from each box.
Despite this, Foodist remains a dwarf among retailers. It generates around 12 million euros in profit annually, which is hard to compare with retailers like, for example, Lidl, which makes around 100 billion in profit, or the shopping centres of the German giant Edeka, where customers spent over 51 billion euros in 2017.
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But with the fast growth of popularity of the subscription economy in the food market, this power balance could change in a matter of years. Especially if the big names of the industry do not leap at the new market opportunity.