Dive Brief:
- General Mills has launched a snack-subscription business in which customers get a variety of snacks by mail each month.
- The service will evoke comparisons to Netflix among most Americans, but the model is clearly Graze.com, the U.K. phenomenon that will roll out a major marketing push here in the U.S. later this month.(Graze, by the way, was founded by former execs of Lovefilm, England's version of Netflix.)
- The General Mills service, dubbed Nibblr, is nearly an exact clone of Graze: offering four small boxes of a variety of snacks for $6.
Dive Insight:
The Graze craze has been fun to watch. And we've been waiting in vain for an invite code to the beta test here in the U.S. for a long time. So you'd think we'd be happy to hear about Nibblr. But we're not.
First, the idea of cloning a business, rather than creating one, leaves a bad taste in our mouth (no pun intended.) Second, and more importantly, we worry that General Mills doesn't have the experience or expertise to build a subscription- or a mail-order business, let alone a Web-based combination of those two.