Recently, SnackNation secured $12 million in Series B funding and is on a roll with their digitally integrated healthy snack delivery business. SnackNation may be focusing on snack delivery now but it’s really building a consumer insights and consumer products delivery platform that can plug in anything.
Will SnackNation become the next big online thing in online retail? After all, Amazon started with books and look at them now.
SnackNation CEO and Co-founder Sean Kelly recently talked about how SnackNation is using consumer data as a cornerstone of its business model:
We are the authority when it comes to discovering emerging and innovative snack food brands. More specifically, we are a tech-enabled snack delivery service that delivers curations to thousands of companies and homes across the country. We go out and find the best emerging and innovative brands that are also better for you and clean and delicious and bring them direct to people.
In today’s world, it’s so important to be able to innovate and iterate, especially if you are a big CPG company. What we do is go direct to the consumer and have a direct relationship with them at their most engaged moments. We collect consumer insights and data that we feed back to the brands so they can better understand their customer and therefore improve their products.
We also use all of that data to determine what emerging brands are going to win tomorrow. We have a predictive analytics engine that gives us a leg up. We sell that data back to brands and there are also ways to work with industry leaders and big CPGs to deliver some of that information to them.
Although we started out focusing on enterprise sales, we don’t look at B2B and B2C as being different. It’s all about where the consumer is. For us, why did we start at the office, it’s because it’s where the younger generation spends the most time.
Being able to collect these insights and having a forward-looking view in terms of what’s going to work and what’s not is very important.
We are actually setting this up as a platform where we can deliver any consumer products through this. Even though our focus is on snacks we are already starting to plug health and beauty items through our consumer insights funnel.
