NatureBox Review: Is It Worth It?

NatureBox is a subscription-based snack company that has been delivering boxes full of unique, nutritionist-approved snacks to subscribers' doors since 2012. Six years after its founding, NatureBox has a lineup of more than 100 different healthy snacks designed to delight your taste buds in between meals without the artificial sweeteners and flavors that overwhelm the snack aisles of local grocery stores. In fact, NatureBox caters to just about any diet, offering dozens of snack options that qualify as vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, milk-free or nut-free foods. If you enjoy new flavors, interesting textures, and fun food combinations, NatureBox is well worth a try.

New NatureBox subscribers have several decisions to make when signing up for the service. Boxes are delivered monthly, with subscribers able to choose from a variety of snacks. Each NatureBox snack is individually packaged to provide between three and five snack servings. If your initial shipments prove to be too much or too little, you can adjust your subscription to match your needs. With appropriate notice, you can always cancel, change or pause your subscription at any time.

You can also choose which snacks are delivered in each shipment from NatureBox's full menu of over 100 options. Adventurous subscribers can leave it up to NatureBox to deliver a specially curated selection each month. Whoever decides on the snacks in your box, the company's 100% satisfaction guarantee entitles you to an extra snack in your next box if you come across one you did not like in your current box.

As of Oct. 2018, the price of each option varies, with discounted snack pricing available for members. Membership is $30 a year. The company has shifted from a set number of snacks a month to offering all its products a la carte.

There are quite a few snack subscription services on the market worth taking a look at, especially if you have a sweet tooth. The major competitors to NatureBox include the likes of Graze, which provides eight single-serve snacks for $13.99 a month. Meanwhile, SnackCrate will get you a box of five snacks for $14, or 10 to 12 snacks for $26. SnackCrate also offers a premium box of 18 to 20 snacks for $49 a month.

NatureBox differs from many other popular subscription services in that it develops and produces all of its own products rather than curating a selection of products from other companies. In fact, NatureBox has received a lot of press in recent years profiling its unique approach to the subscription-box business.

NatureBox relies heavily on snack ratings from its subscriber base and customer data from its direct-sales model to make decisions about what kinds of new snack products are likely to be most successful. This analytical approach has helped NatureBox reduce the time it takes to develop and release a new product to about 90 days on average.

In fact, NatureBox always has many new products in development, often introducing multiple new snack items to subscribers on a monthly basis. In comparison, most consumer packaged goods companies take 18 to 36 months to get a single new product idea on supermarket shelves. NatureBox has also started offering its products in retail stores, such as Target (TGT). 

NatureBox's ability to innovate quickly and successfully has been a big reason why so many subscribers join the service and then stick with it over time. Private equity investors have also been impressed with the company. It's raised a total of $58.5 million over four rounds. In 2013, NatureBox received $8.5 million in Series A financing led by General Catalyst Partners and Softbank Capital. This comes after the $2 million seed round led by General Catalyst. 

Then it completed its Series B round in 2014 by raising  $18 million in financing led by Canaan Partners and in 2015 it took in $30 million via Series C financing led by Global Founders Capital. On top of the funding, the company has hired several experienced executives from Fortune 500 companies to help manage product and subscriber growth. As of Oct. 2018, it's looking to raise more financing, which comes after it cut a third of its corporate staff in Dec. While there are no imminent plans for an initial public offering (IPO), NatureBox certainly seems to be headed in that direction.