Inside Bean Box’s Holiday Strategy and Partnership With Walmart

 Since 2014, Bean Box has helped consumers discover and develop a love for gourmet coffee, sourced from some of the world’s best specialty coffee roasters. Its products focus on discovery, curation, and the tasting experience, and while it has reached a wide audience through its direct-to-consumer (D-to-C) model, until late 2021, the brand hadn’t really considered selling its products wholesale.

In late 2021, a buyer from Walmart reached out to Bean Box. Walmart, responding to a growing appetite among its customers for higher quality coffee, was making a concerted effort to find a new supplier that had access to a variety of regional coffee roasters (in Bean Box’s case, 50-plus roasters from Portland, ME to Portland, OR), and that could provide products that focused on the tasting experience. Bean Box spent the spring of 2022 onboarding as a supplier, and by summer’s end its single-serve Coffeegram product line was on shelves in over 900 Walmart stores throughout the U.S.

As Bean Box built its relationship with Walmart and its buyer, the brand proposed creating a retail-specific version of the coffee advent calendar that sold out in 2021. The product, a 6 Merry Mornings of Coffee Collection, features holiday-themed Coffeegrams that come in a holiday-inspired package. For Walmart, the strategy is to leverage demand for coffee gifts during the holiday season to inspire consumers to seek out great coffee year-round. As part of the order, Walmart is also selling a holiday-themed version of Bean Box’s single-brew Coffeegram called the Stocking Stuffer. For Bean Box, these products embody its mission, extended into the theater of retail, and capitalize on its unique tasting products.

Beyond the obvious win-win of selling its products through one of the largest retailers on Earth, for Bean Box there’s another great advantage: brand exposure. As a small but growing D-to-C brand, it reaches a decent-sized, albeit self-selecting, audience online. But being on shelves and end caps at Walmart, all of the foot traffic that sees the products (whether or not they end up purchasing it) contributes to a level of mass-market awareness that will ultimately magnify Bean Box’s core direct business. The mere presence in the coffee aisle — nestled next to household names like Blue Bottle, Stumptown, and others — is great for Bean Box’s brand authority in the crowded coffee market.

When Bean Box tells people about this partnership, it always gets the same two questions: how did you get “into” Walmart, and what’s it like being a supplier for it? The answer to the first question is simple: Walmart reached out to Bean Box. The buyer, in his consumer persona, saw — and loved — the 2021 Coffee Advent Calendar. He’s also an avid coffee drinker, and quickly saw that Bean Box’s mission, products, and emphasis on discovery, curation and the tasting experience all dovetailed with his priorities at Walmart. In other words, Bean Box built its relationship with Walmart by reaching the buyer as a consumer. In that respect, starting as a D-to-C business, where there's direct access to consumer feedback, gave Bean Box every advantage.

As for working with one the largest retailers on the planet, that’s another story entirely, especially for holiday-specific orders, where the volumes, timelines and transport requirements can be extreme. In order to become a supplier, Bean Box needed to evolve many of the aspects of its manufacturing and operations. For example, implementing and integrating EDI (for electronic ordering, ship notifications, invoices, etc.) took at least two months. It also had to prepare for — and pass — a third-party food safety audit, which meant a ton of new paperwork, habits and process.

The biggest shift Bean Box had to make really centered on scale, and for this holiday order it developed a detailed, multimonth plan that covered everything from sourcing coffee and packaging materials to all of the work to make and prepare the product for Walmart: casing, palletizing, storing, staging, and handing off literally hundreds of pallets worth of product onto 53’ shipping containers. When Bean Box started the project, it didn’t even have a forklift! Of course, these are all what might be called “high class problems,” but they really do present real challenges for companies that are either new to wholesale or are still small businesses.

All 50 tons of the amazing coffee Bean Box sourced for these orders was available to purchase in over 3,500 Walmart stores — whether for some lucky coffee lover or for personal enjoyment. And as you walk by the Bean Box Stocking Stuffers and Merry Mornings on those end caps, enjoy the amazing aroma of all that super tasty holiday coffee!

As the co-founder and chief executive officer of Bean Box, a global marketplace for specialty coffees, coffee subscriptions, and coffee gifts, Matthew Berk is responsible for the development, growth, and vision of the brand.