Hungryroot

I've been a Hungryroot customer for a few years now...probably three or four at this point. And there are a few key reasons why I love it: 🍴 Its recipes are health AND easy. A double whammy for my household. 🍴 Recipes each week are tailored based on my personal preferences and eating habits. 🍴 If I'm in need of more basic grocery staples, I can easily update my order and use my credits to incorporate some fun snacks, breakfast goods and produce into the mix. 🍴 And so much more! But there's a lot of work that goes behind into the Hungryroot experience behind the scenes, including its robust operations to get products to customers quickly and efficiently AND minimize food waste. I wanted to understand how it all worked, so I invited the company's CDO Alex Weinstein on the show. First of all: his passion for the industry and the Hungryroot business is CONTAGIOUS. Second: I loved hearing how his left brain and right brain conjoin, because we spent equal time geeking out on tech as basic brand differentiation and CX principles. I know this grocery ecomm/delivery space is fascinating for many, so I think this episode provides a fascinating inside scoop to one of the top companies in this sector. #ecommerce #digitalgrocery #retail #grocerytrends

We care a lot about food — not just how it tastes, but where it comes from. The EATS Act is counter to everything we stand for here at Hungryroot, dangerously undoing common-sense animal welfare regulations. Together with other industry leaders, we're proud to oppose the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act (S.2019 and H.R.4417) and any version of this legislation. The stakes are high; the bill threatens to overturn two state laws, California Prop 12 and Massachusetts' Question 3, which require farm animals to be raised without cruel, intensive factory farming practices. If you'd like to get involved, contact your legislators and let them know that you oppose any version of the EATS Act and any effort to undermine Prop 12 or Question 3 in the Farm Bill. The future of animal welfare is in our hands.

I just published a big report on Hungryroot, a fascinating online grocery startup ($330mm in sales last year, 40% growth) that you should know more about. There is a lot of talk about #AI someday transforming the shopping and commerce experience — this is a company that's already doing it. Around 70% of the groceries it sells are chosen by its algorithm, which is entirely focused on customer retention. Some great details in here — thanks, Ben McKean, for your time. The New Consumer:

This week I had the honor of serving as a judge for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Three takeaways: (1) Entrepreneur is not a title, it’s a mindset. It’s more than being a founder. It’s a love of problem solving, creating, and making a difference. It’s optimism and grit, and it doesn’t have to be limited to business. (2) Every business needs a purpose. Even companies that are inherently more transactional (selling tires, for example) can positively impact the world. It’s the entrepreneur’s job to find and articulate that deeper meaning. (3) It’s okay to be proud. In fact, it’s part of your job. After we raised our Series C at Hungryroot, I felt a bit of imposter syndrome. But as we’ve progressed and with advice from my trusted advisor and friend Mindy Grossman, I’ve realized it’s my job to market myself and my company. If you believe in your company’s purpose, you have a responsibility to share it with your head held high. Congrats to all of this year’s finalists (award winners will be announced soon): April Koh Harry Ritter Brad Charron Tracy Ongena, CDP Brian Rudolph Scott Rudolph Tom Fogarty Frank Yu Phil B. Christine Chang Sarah Lee Saad Alam Alex Ross Jared Karson Jose Herrera Devin Daly Roman Pedan Ben Lewis Jason Guss Gal Krubiner Nathan Kondamuri Michael Kopko Pete Anevski Arnaud Plas Ben Checketts Nate Checketts Nicole Wegman Dilip Rao Chuck Canton Brian Bordainick Alex Eu Kevin Rikio Shiiba Michael Sutherland Brown Jared K. Bharanidharan Rajakumar Glen Moller Aaron Schumm

Our founder and CEO Ben McKean and Lightspeed investor Jeremy Liew were on CNBC today talking about how Hungryroot uses AI to cut food waste by up to 80% in our warehouses and at our customers’ homes. Take a look! 🥗🌎 https://lnkd.in/dHK_-3hA

💥 Vanity metrics alert! 🎉 We just hit $1,000,000,000 of lifetime revenue at Hungryroot. That’s one billion dollars of sales since our founding with the majority coming over the past 18 months. Why does this matter? It doesn’t. What matters is the impact we have on our customers’ lives, like Kamie, Rebecca and Peggy as shown below. This is what motivates us each day — to help people feel their best through easy, healthy food. But we’re also proud of the scale we’ve reached, for the bigger we get, the more people we can support. If you’re one of those people who have trusted us to feed your family, we thank you today, as always. 

We just wrapped up our third annual Camp Hungryroot ⛺️🎉 where we brought the full corporate team together for connection, reflection and celebration. Here are some highlights: (1) We started the retreat with a customer panel. It set the tone for the entire week. Five long-term customers described their experiences using Hungryroot — from why they started, to how it’s impacted their daily lives, to how we can make it better. It was inspirational, emotional and informative all at once. In our highly data driven world, it was an important reminder of the human impact of our work. (2) We conducted a training on giving feedback. We each reflected on the best feedback we’ve ever received. Mine? To smile more. We also talked about the importance of communicating as clearly and concisely as possible. The longer a document or email, the less people are going to read it, and the less each person will digest it. (3) Lastly, we celebrated. We have ambitious goals, and it’s often easy to allow those to overshadow all that we have accomplished. As a remote first team, time in person is critical, and we spent it deepening bonds, building camaraderie, and sharing laughs 🤩

This week is 9 years since I started Hungryroot. Some reflections… Entrepreneurship is a journey. Nine years is a long time with many ups and downs. Here are some that come to mind: (1) The first couple of years were mayhem. Dave Kong, still our CTO, wrote our first line of code. Zoe Stephens (Mesirow), Gregory Struck, Franklin Becker and I essentially lived at the production kitchen. Often our eyes stung because the company next door was making ginger shots all day. I often thought “what have I done?” (2) Two years in was our first major pivot. It was 2017, and we had just hit a million dollars a month in sales. Awesome! Except it wasn’t. The entire supply chain was holding on by a thread, and it wasn’t sustainable. We shut down the business (and all revenue) for six months to restructure. Painful, but necessary. (3) We emerged from that pivot much stronger, and we raised $22M of capital from Lightspeed in early 2018. We then set on a year long path to rebrand. We laid out two options: (1) be the “Allbirds of food” by highlighting the characteristics of our unique food products; or (2) be the “Stitch Fix of food” by building a deeply personalized digital experience. We chose the former. It didn’t work. (4) It was early 2019 when we realized we had chosen the wrong path. So we — Ruth Spencer, Kylie Conibear, Robin Canterella, Meredith Deinema, Molly Rundberg-Villa, Taimoor Q., Brice Fridlington, Allison St. Rock to name a few — spent six months pivoting toward the second option, what we are today: a personalized grocery service that makes it easy to eat healthy. Fortunately, this worked. By the end of 2019, we had positive momentum and felt back on track. (5) 2020 was Covid and everything that came with it. We felt fortunate to be growing and felt a responsibility to give back, which we did through our free deliveries for front line workers initiative. We went remote, which we still are today. And we really developed the foundation of our current business, investing into our algorithm, food assortment and digital experience. (6) 2021 through 2023 was when we “grew up” as an organization. We grew revenue from $67M (2020) to $162M (2021) to $238M (2022) to $333M (2023). We hired incredibly talented leadership across the entire organization and setup structures to help us scale. Most importantly, we invested significantly into the customer experience, increasing revenue per customer over 50% from 2021 to 2023 (we now have the highest revenue per customer of any online food company with sales over $100M, based on Earnest Analytics data). (7) 2024 is a new chapter for Hungryroot. It’s a pivotal year. We believe we can grow to a billion dollars in sales over the next few years, but that requires us to move quickly, think outside the box, and execute. In many ways, it’s back to the beginning — focus, action, and experimentation. I’m excited to see how this chapter unfolds.

We’re excited and proud to share that Forbes has named Hungryroot as one of America's Best Startup Employers 2024. Our mission and values are at the core of everything we do, and this recognition is a testament to that. Thank you to our amazing team and all their contributions that make Hungryroot a great place to work!  #Forbes #BestStartupEmployers

A couple weeks ago, I shared our 2023 financial results. This week, I figured I’d share something a little more vulnerable… our top three greatest challenges. (1) Brand. Brand has always been challenging at Hungryroot. Are we a grocery delivery service? A meal delivery service? Our customers see us as somewhere in between (in fact, research shows they consider us 60% grocery delivery, 40% meal delivery). But what does that even mean? We believe that we are defining an entirely new category: personalized grocery. Customers trust us to choose their foods for their week. We personalize their deliveries with healthy groceries, easy recipes and essential supplements based on their lifestyles, health goals, preferences, and budget. Our goal is to lead this new category — that starts with more clearly communicating what it is and how it helps people. (2) Marketing. We’ve grown Hungryroot to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue almost exclusively on performance marketing. This means if an advertisement does not drive a measurable direct response, we deem it to be unsuccessful. This approach has served us well by limiting our customer acquisition costs and ensuring profitable growth, but it also restricts the advertising channels in which we can market. For example, a billboard is rarely going to drive a measurable direct response, but it might be critical for introducing people to our service. Attributing new customers to advertising efforts is notoriously challenging — hence why we and others use marketing mix models to make sense of all the noise. In 2024, we are going to more intentionally test spend levels in various channels and launch geo-specific advertising in order to better understand the downstream impacts of marketing in non-direct response channels. (3) Execution. 2024 is all about execution at Hungryroot. We’ve reached a scale where maintaining 40% year-over-year growth (what we achieved in 2023) requires constant innovation, ambitious goal setting and efficient execution. To achieve this, we are taking inspiration from Jeff Bezos’ concept of “one way and two way doors.” One way door decisions are difficult to reverse and therefore require significant time and analysis. But the vast majority of decisions we make are two way door decisions, which can be quickly reversed. This requires greater risk tolerance. We will find that we made the wrong decision, but as long as it’s a two way door decision, we can rapidly revert back. We believe the benefit of fast iteration and learning made possible by this approach outweighs the downsides. In 2024, we aim to make this shift across our organization. If you face similar challenges in your business, feel free to drop a note below. Maybe we can help.