Start a meal kit subscription business with Shopify
Nine years ago, I quit my job to help Hadi Irvani to start a meal kit business PeachDish, we started from a MVP product, it’s some JSP pages and a form to collect customer emails and money, it’s a successful trial, and people love the idea.
There was no existing tech solutions for meal kit out there, so we build our initial website from scratch on AWS very quickly. It’s a wild journey, we didn’t meet in the first year, I started working with him on Fiverr (my nickname is Rocwing, and we formed another company WingFive which is another story)
We were exciting in the beginning, everything looks great, we had a great team and formed a company. I worked with a product manager, a designer and another developer, we continue adding new features to our website, and a lot of other functions that can help operation and marketing.
But at some point we can not grow it anymore, I can feel we were becoming slow, and we failed six years later.
Even though the tech is not the only problem, but I’m thinking how fast we can be revenue positive if there was an existing solution for the business, how far we can go if we can focus on marketing and operation.
After that, I went back to freelancing and built a similar platform for the same business in Canada, it took me eight months to finish the first version, it’s even more complicated than PeachDish, then we launched it but it never took off.
After that I worked on several e-commerce projects based on WooCommerce and Shopify, I was fascinated how fast it can be to built a working website and system for a e-commerce business, I like Shopify better because it’s easier to maintain, from the owner perspective, I think Shopify is the better solution.
When I looked back what I have done, I can’t help to ask myself, is it possible to start a meal kit subscription business with Shopify?
First, let’s see what features does a meal kit subscription business need, it could be simple, and it doesn’t have to be subscription mode, but if you look at the major meal kit companies like Blueapron, HelloFresh, they usually have the features:
- weekly menus, it will have different menus per week, and it will show the menus of several weeks, this is the big difference from how it show products with the normal e-commerce.
- delivery date, customers can choose when they want to receive the box because it’s the food, and it’s also important for the operator
- Customer can choose menus every week for their subscription, it’s also a big difference from the normal subscription which will send the same products, sometimes, the operators need to select menus for the customers as surprise box.
I tried several APPs: Bold subscriptions , Appstle℠ Subscriptions, Awtomatic Subscriptions.
I like Awtomatic Subscriptions a lot, I even scheduled a demo session to check if it has all the features to build a meal kit business, we can use their build a box feature as menu page, but you can’t select the menu in advance, which means you can’t have weekly menu feature. You can choose menus for your customers, but you can’t do it in batch.
After trying several APPs, I didn’t find one that can meet all the needs, they usually can build simple meal kit subscription, I can understand, when you build common functions, you will have wide audience, which will be good for the marketing.
But I wasn’t sure if it’s possible to build the features we need for the meal kit, so I tried Shopify subscription API, I found it’s quite flexible, I used Stripe API a lot, I found a subscription contract is like a payment token, which make it easy to build functions around it.
I think the normal subscription APP will add meta info (build a box selection) to the subscription itself, but if we want a weekly menus, we have to build connections between selection and subscription, and this part has to be done in the APP, it is an intermediate process from menu selection to the order.
Another thing about weekly menus that we need to consider about is, how to show the menu page, Shopify call it customer-facing subscription portal, Shopify recommend to use application proxy full page rending, which means it’s a page from the APP. But I’m also looking into theme app extension , not sure if it’s possible. The reason I’m considering it is SEO, application proxy will be one page application, and it’s a security link, it’s hard to show separate menu page, but maybe we can add something to the menu product page, so customer can click it then go to subscription plan page.
Shopify has been changed a lot since I knew it, it’s more and more powerful and flexible and still keep the core simple.
So, let’s get started.