Universal Yums: Over ten million subscription boxes with WooCommerce

Universal Yums is a subscription snack box offering tasty treats from around the world. Customers can choose their own subscription or gift one to another, for a variety of durations and from a plethora of countries. Each box contains a number of snacks from the same country, and a different country’s snacks are sent out each month.

The company turned ten in October of 2024, and has grown to over 100,000 active subscribers, with anticipated growth during the upcoming holiday season. They’ve sold over ten million boxes to date.

We originally chatted with Universal Yums founders Monique Bernstein and Eli Zauner back in 2017, when the business reached their first million in sales. 

Recently, Universal Yums’s CTO, Devin Price, sat down with Woo’s CTO, Beau Lebens, and CMO, Tamara Niesen, for an in-depth look at where the business stands ten years in, and how they’ve gotten to this point.

• Earns approximately $40M per year in revenue.
• Serves over 100,000 active subscribers, with seasonal holiday growth.
• Operates with a team of 50 between their office and warehouse.
• Have sold over ten million snack boxes.
• Run 10,000 renewals per hour on renewal day.

• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• Klaviyo email marketing
• High-performance order storage
• Fulfil.io warehouse management
• Custom checkout flow
• Custom product definitions
• Meta ads
• Laravel, built a custom data service

As one might imagine, sending out ten million boxes of delicious snacks doesn’t come easily. Universal Yums is meticulous in their planning.

For each year, they’ll complete a planning process around their big bets, and then break those into quarterly goals. “I often joke with the CEO that he’s trying to build the most complex business possible, because every bit of Universal Yums has so much complexity to it,” Devin shared.

They start with sourcing, leveraging supplier relationships around the world. Their procurement team manages this process, connecting with folks from every country that they import snacks from. 

Then, their compliance team steps in: Ingredients and nutrition information must follow certain regulations in the U.S., which means their suppliers have to update wrappers or add stickers to meet FDA standards.  

Next, they coordinate shipping logistics, sometimes planning an import six months in advance, and constantly adjusting for unplanned delays like FDA inspections, or global events like COVID-19 or port strikes. But for a food business, perishable goods mean speed is of the essence. 

To help manage this complex procurement process and warehouse operations, Universal Yums integrates with  Fulfil.io. Their store sends purchase orders into Fulfil.io, which allows their warehouse team to pick and pack orders, and provides other tools for finance and procurement teams.

Universal Yums has also built custom code into their product listings, so that all of the boxes are defined and are associated with availability dates and the products they contain. For example, they use this custom code to note whether the box contains chocolate or other perishable items, helping Universal Yums manage expiring products and their availability on their website.

To keep things interesting for their customers, Universal Yums purposely doesn’t fill boxes with snacks that they know everyone will love — they want to challenge their customers in the same way that you’d be a bit challenged by unfamiliar cuisines. This keeps with the spirit of Monique’s idea for the business, which was inspired by her time spent living in China. 

During the order process, customers navigate through a custom checkout flow. Like a standard subscription order, they select a box size and duration. But with Universal Yums, customers also get to choose the country that their goodies come from. 

On the checkout page, Universal Yums has built in custom options for shipping and order dates so that the food arrives when the customer wants it to. For a smooth process behind the scenes, Universal Yums integrates this data with the third party partnerships that their business relies on for warehouse management, order tracking, email marketing, and advertising.

For Universal Yums, a subscription business model offers the best of both consistent monthly revenue and seasonal boosts: “For the holiday season, especially in November and December, we see an absolute spike in gifting,” Devin shared. Customer acquisition is much more expensive than customer retention, so it makes sense that Universal Yums has seen so much success with their business model.

Despite the logistical complexities of importing international foods, Devin is always enthusiastic about the challenge of building a subscription business: “The subscription model is a really fun business model. If you have a business and can find a way to incorporate subscriptions, I think it’s a really neat way to have a connection with your customer and build a relationship — and obviously build predictable recurring revenue. It really helps even out any business. If people are looking to explore subscriptions, I think it’s really an interesting way to go.”

Even with their success, Devin and the team at Universal Yums are always looking for ways to improve. The team is currently exploring transferable gift subscriptions and gift cards, to allow recipients to take over their subscriptions, and manage and continue them if they want to.

Universal Yums has sent out a staggering ten million boxes since its inception, with peak sales periods seeing up to 30 orders per minute. “It’s been really fun,” Devin noted. “It’s great to work on an ecommerce site of this scale because you immediately see the impact of any changes you make.”

One such change, made during an early growth period, was automating their shipping data exports. When the business hit five million orders, they also needed to change the way they stored and managed their customer data. The customer dashboard had started to slow down due to the large query size and lots of metadata joins.

“We had done some hacks in terms of the type of order … so that we could use them to run more efficient queries,” Devin said. “But with high-performance order storage (HPOS), we’ve been able to roll back all those hacks, and the dashboard runs just as quickly.”

Upgrading their server resources was another necessity, given they have over 100,000 subscribers — a number that grows over the holiday period. On renewal days, they’ll process 10,000 renewals per hour and send up to 500,000 emails at a time.

To ensure their website runs smoothly at such a high volume of activity, Devin’s team needed to review all of their queries and optimize the processes that pull customer data, so that if uncached visitors land on their website, the site can handle that traffic. They’ll also use transients to store temporary data that they don’t want to constantly be querying. 

On the front end of the business, customer engagement is key to their success and growth. The importance of their customer relationships is clear: “Once you’ve worked so hard to acquire a customer, you want to keep them for as long as possible. So, we do a customer survey every month to get feedback on the month’s box and how people are using it.”

They’ve learned that their customers subscribe for different purposes. Some order just for themselves or send boxes as gifts, while others share a box with roommates, friends, or their whole family. The goal for Universal Yums is to get the right box to the right people, and have the right products inside.

But it’s not just the happy customers — they learn from churned customers, too. “When we have a customer churn — when they cancel their subscription — we want to understand the reasons why they are ending their subscription. So we have this customer survey that we show when someone cancels, and we just asked about sentiment. Were they happy or not happy with the experience, and we ask the reasons why they cancel.”

Universal Yums has a thorough understanding of why the average person cancels, and uses this information to constantly upgrade their customer experience and reduce their churn rates. 

They also use customer feedback to inform future box decisions: “We try not to repeat a country for at least two years, but when the country does come around again, we will take all that customer feedback about what people really loved and we’ll try to include a couple of those, and then something new for subscribers that have been with us for more than two years.”

To build new relationships, Universal Yums’ marketing team is constantly refining their work, testing new types of ad creative and messaging to figure out what resonates with people, and what potential customers are looking for in the moment.

Co-founder Eli Zauner built the original universalyums.com on WordPress back in 2014, and managed it himself during their first years of business. With their growth, which we talked about in their 2017 customer story, they brought in an agency to improve and scale the website. 

Four years ago, Devin was their first engineering hire, taking over things on the tech end and continuing to work with the agency. Gradually, they brought more of the site work in-house, recently becoming a team of three full-time employees and two part-time contractors. The engineering team works closely with other areas of the business to build out new experiences and launch new products on the website.

Much of their focus has been on managing the flow of data between WooCommerce and their third party integrations. To do this more effectively, Universal Yums built a custom data layer that sits between WooCommerce and their third parties, which helps them control the flow of information and push the right data to the right service.

That all said, they never really expected much collaboration from WooCommerce (and were pleasantly surprised when that did happen): “It’s an open source project, right? We don’t pay for WooCommerce, so we weren’t really expecting any kind of support,” Devin said. “We have a great internal team, and try to build what we can. But recently, we did have an issue with our renewals after switching to high performance order storage. We debugged it as much as we could. Then the WooCommerce team jumped in — multiple people messaged me saying, ‘Hey, we’ll take a look at this.’”

The Woo team put Universal Yums’ bug into an issue in GitHub, and Devin’s team was able to work with one of the core architects of HPOS to reproduce and solve the problem. “He figured out how to reproduce the issue when we couldn’t. It seemed like an edge case to us, but the Woo team was super supportive in tracking it down and putting a fix in.”

“We initially weren’t counting on WooCommerce support — we wanted to find a fix immediately for our customers, so we also worked on a solution ourselves, which is really cool. If you’re running on Shopify and there’s a bug or a problem, you probably can’t touch anything about it. But for us, we’re like, okay, we’re seeing this issue right now, let’s see if we can get a patch.”

— Devin Price, CTO, Universal Yums

“We patched WooCommerce core ourselves, and our next round of renewals was fine. Then, the [Woo] core team came up with a more bulletproof solution that they rolled out to everyone. It was nice to be able to find something, alert the team, and now WooCommerce is improved for everyone.”

Devin stays in touch with the Woo team: “It’s always been super supportive, which we appreciate. But we also love that we can just take the software and run with it, adding our own tweaks.”

It’s something that we highly value at Woo — we love working with store owners and builders and learning more about their experience with WooCommerce.

“That’s exactly the sort of feedback loop we’re trying to create. It may be an edge case for you, but it turns out when you’ve got millions of merchants doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things with your software, those edge cases often don’t end up being that edge after all. We want to make sure that the platform is capable of handling all of it.”

— Beau Lebens, CTO, Woo

Devin shared the sentiment: “I can imagine all of the different use cases for WooCommerce, from rentals to membership, there’s just so many companies doing it in so many different ways. So yeah, we’re doing high scale subscriptions and we have our little snags. But we know it’s a lot of surface area to cover for your team, and we appreciate it.”

In the near term, Universal Yums is working on refinements for their checkout experience. They’re further customizing the steps that a customer goes through to select their box and subscription options. One of the benefits of running their store on WooCommerce is that they can A/B test the two experiences to see which results in a higher conversion rate.

At the end of the interview, Beau opened up the conversation to ask Devin if there was anything he wanted to cover, and we might be biased, but we loved what he had to say:

“We’ve built a really huge business on WooCommerce. I know people ask, can you scale it? The answer is yes. Get some solid hosting. Then you can grow your business on Woo, and not have to pay a margin to another third party [platform] — and you own your whole tech stack.”

— Devin Price, CTO, Universal Yums

“You can negotiate really good rates with credit card providers at that scale and own every aspect of [your business]. And that’s why we’re on WooCommerce: so we can customize and build a great experience.”

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.