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Bloomberg
The company once known as the Netflix of snacks looks a bit more like Blockbuster video these days—but not in a bad way.
Graze, which started selling snack boxes via online subscriptions in the UK a few years back, is for the first time generating a majority of its sales through physical stores—a reminder that food is still almost entirely a brick-and-mortar business.
But since Graze, majority-owned by the Carlyle Group, began as an e-commerce business, it enjoys a key advantage that Blockbuster didn’t have when it was killed off by Netflix. It was only about two years ago—well after the company had an online presence—that it started pursuing growth by pushing into traditional stores.
“Fundamentally, lots of people want to keep buying snacks in stores,†said Anthony Fletcher, the company’s 36-year-old chief executive officer. “It’s a very different strategy from how we ran the business for the first four or five years.â€
Graze.com was founded in 2008 and came to the US about three years ago. In the fiscal year, the company generated almost $100 million in revenue, an 8 percent increase over the prior year, according to Fletcher. The sales are roughly split evenly between the US and the UK. Graze’s snack boxes are now in about 20,000 US stores, including CVS, Harris Teeter and Safeway.