How Snacks With Bite pivoted during the pandemic to become $1m business

A 28-year-old woman transformed her office-focused business during the pandemic to surpass $1m in revenue in just over a year.

Natasha Giannetti’s stomach sunk when employees were sent home at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, nearly destroying her freshly launched business entirely aimed at catering for office workers.

The 28-year-old Melbourne businesswoman had spent years researching, investing and finetuning her concept Snacks With Bite, a subscription-based food delivery service.

The company launched in January 2020 to provide creative healthy snacks to workers, operating much the same as milk and fruit deliveries do.

The communal snack stands were designed to be set up in offices and restocked weekly or monthly.

But after two months of operation, the business’s subscriptions almost completely dried up as employees were forced to retreated to working from home, leaving the young chief executive with a warehouse full of stock she knew she wouldn’t be able to sell.

“I was absolutely terrified,” Ms Giannetti told NCA NewsWire.

RELATED: $10m idea borne in ‘dimly lit smoky bars’

Two months after the business was launched, office workers were sent home. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Daniel Pockett

“As you can imagine, an office subscription business wasn't the best idea when all of the offices in Australia had pretty much closed.

“Like any business owner at that time, I didn't know what was coming — I didn’t know when it would end or what the right thing to do was.”

Ms Giannetti was left with two options — effectively shut the business down and put her concept into hibernation or significantly change the business model.

She said the initial subscription-based inspiration was borne out of solving a pain point for office-based clients, so she went back to the well to figure out what that next issue for companies was.

“That’s when the next idea came,” she said, revealing her business’s pivot led to the company selling more than 20,000 snack boxes and surpassing $1m in revenue in a little over a year of operation.

“Now that people were working from home, what’s the new pain point? What’s a service I can provide that’s going to give my customers value when they’re not in the office?

“I spoke to customers and asked what were the biggest issues and the biggest theme was the fact they were noticing their employees were losing motivation from home and feeling really down.

Snacks with Bite evolved during pandemic.

“That's the reason we pivoted the business to work from home boxes. We changed it so we were sending boxes of snacks to employees at home to brighten up their days and thank them for working crazy hours from home.”

Ms Giannetti, who runs the business from a co-working space in Melbourne’s trendy inner-north suburb of Fitzroy, hopes the forced transformation in Snacks With Bite has given the business another revenue stream now employees have begun returning to offices.

“For a business, it's good to have as many revenue channels as possible so it’s a real positive now to know the business has legs to do both,” she said.

The 28-year-old is now focused on another issue to take the business to the next level — companies struggling to attract employees back into offices.

“A lot of employees are used to being at home now,” Ms Giannetti said.

“So the pain point that we're filling and the solution we’re giving our clients now is that it’s a really fun, healthy, nice incentive to bring your employees back to the office.

“So that's what we’re going for this year.”

Originally published as How Snacks With Bite pivoted during the pandemic to become $1m business