‘Subscription fatigue’ has hit meal kit companies hard

Earlier this month, Daily Harvest, best known for its smoothies, dropped the subscription requirement on its DTC site. And this week, The Cumin Club, which sells quick-prep Indian meals, is also doing away with its subscription offering and transitioning to a flexible one-time ordering option on its DTC site for the first time.

Part of this effort also includes these companies aiming to become more omnipresent. Daily Harvest has entered more grocery stores like Target and Kroger over the past few years, while Blue Apron now also sells on platforms like Misfits Market. The goal is to adapt to commitment- and budget-sensitive customers who prefer to try online food services in a more flexible way.  

The Cumin Club, which launched in 2021, made the strategic decision after years of customers asking for a more flexible ordering option to try the products before committing to a subscription. The company previously offered five, 10 or 20 meals through a monthly subscription, with the discount getting steeper with every tier. Pricing started at $7.59 per meal for the smallest bundle. The company currently generates about $5 million in annual revenue and is growing at a 50% year-over-year rate.

Ragoth Bala, co-founder of The Cumin Club, said he expects the offerings of both one-time and subscribe-and-save options to help reduce friction and prolong the customer lifecycle. “Being able to order one time means the addressable market increases significantly, especially for ethnic cuisine,” he said. 

Prior to making the decision, Bala debated the à la carte ordering option with other brand owners and industry experts for some time. “Where we have landed is essentially that subscription fatigue is real,” he said. “Our customers or would-be customers wrote to us saying, ‘I would really love to try this but I hate subscriptions.’” 

The Cumin Club had been directing these customers to Amazon, which Bala said meant losing out on data and a direct relationship with the customer. As part of kickstarting its omnichannel strategy, the company began selling bundles of select bestselling SKUs on Amazon about three years ago. “We also used Walmart.com and a few other platforms as a trial channel,” Bala said. Most recently, The Cumin Club launched at Sprouts nationwide and in 270 Walmart stores.

However, Bala said DTC is currently 85% of the business that the company wants to continue investing in.

Leading up to the new hybrid model, the company had been A/B testing one-time ordering on its website, including at different price points and discounts. The bright spot, said Bala, is that while the subscriptions had lower trial rates, their repeat purchases were at a higher margin. The tests also showed that nearly 65% of new customers opted for the subscribe-and-save plan, which he said is promising for retention. 

With the new flexibility, Bala said the brand’s marketing will shift to include more storytelling and product education versus just focusing on performance marketing to acquire new customers. The Cumin Club forecasts that its customer acquisition costs will decrease by 25% with the introduction of one-time ordering. 

The subscription meal delivery category has faced numerous challenges over the years, including higher CACs and rising fulfillment costs.  

Jacob Moelter, COO and CFO of customer support provider SupportNinja, said that meal kits have not necessarily lost all relevance. However, rigid subscriptions have, due to consumer behavior. “Customers still want convenience, but they no longer want to be locked into a ‘set-and-forget’ plan,” Moelter said. “They’re more price-sensitive and far more likely to pause, skip or adjust orders week to week.”

In a recent report. from SupportNinja, where someone “mystery shopped” from four different meal delivery services, Moelter noted one common friction point that showed up repeatedly. When a customer tries to pause, skip or cancel a delivery after a delayed box or an unexpected menu swap, they are often met with tight cutoff windows, unclear brand policies and slow support. “That small moment turns into an outsized frustration and often results in churn,” Moelter said.

The onset of flex plans in this category can work because they remove that friction. More flexible options “acknowledge that modern consumers want control and forgiveness built into the model, not policies that assume perfect weekly behavior,” Moelter said.

For The Cumin Club, offering one-time ordering is meant to lower the barrier of entry for DTC customers and then hopefully convert them to subscribers. 

“It is harder for some people to just jump into a subscription right away,” Bala said. “Now we have a much larger addressable market to go after in our ads.”