Undercutting Startups, Walmart Launches Food Subscription Service, Goodies.co, For $7 Per Month

Walmart’s experimentation with subscription-based commerce continues today, with the public launch of Goodies.co, a food subscription service featuring boxes of sample-sized treats shipped monthly. The service is the latest to emerge from @WalmartLabs, the retailer’s Silicon Valley-based innovation lab focused on quickly building, launching, and testing new business models that may or may not make their way to Walmart.com or Walmart stores at a later date. @WalmartLabs, which operates something like a startup within Walmart, has grown over the years through the acquisitions of other startups, including?Kosmix,?OneRiot,?Grabble,?and?Small Society. The group is often focused on e-commerce initiatives, like Shopycat, its gift recommendation service launched last year. Shopycat, incidentally, is one of @WalmartLabs’ successes – the Facebook-based gift suggestions it offers are now making their way to Walmart.com just ahead of this holiday season. Another lab innovation, Polaris, is also?now the search engine on Walmart.com. News that Walmart would begin testing a subscription-based commerce offering called Goodies.co was first revealed this May, with the expectation of it launching within “a month or two.” However, the service ended up launching its beta in August instead. Initially tested by Walmart employees, then later spreading further through word-of-mouth, Goodies.co now reaches 3,000 users across the U.S. Goodies customers pay just $7 per month for a box of six to eight sample products, which would otherwise retail for $15. The price includes tax and shipping, making it one of the cheapest e-commerce food subscription services on the market today. To compare, the startup Love With Food, a graduate from the 500 Startups accelerator, charges $10 per month for a box with eight items. Pop-Up Pantry’s meal-focused box starts at $17 per month, and healthy snacks service Sprigbox begins at $26.95 per month, for a box of 10-13 items. Like others in this space, Walmart’s box includes a variety of unique, gourmet products, a mix of artisanal, organic, gluten-free, or other healthy items, sourced both from Walmart’s extensive vendor community, as well as from newer companies just emerging on the market. For now, Walmart isn’t aiming to profit from the subscription service so much as it’s interested in testing the viability of the subscription business model itself, still largely unproven. According to @WalmartLabs’ VP of Products, Ravi Raj, his team is “fairly confident” that they can drive tens of thousands of customers to the new service. “But it will start to get meaningful for Walmart once we

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