When online food sellers and buyers find the right niche

October 23, 2014 

BMC POV

Selling products through their own websites gives many smaller players access to a new reservoir of demand for their products, but some sellers evolve to create their own online stores. These stores expand the appeal of online food shopping and create new market niches that better serve increasingly demanding shoppers. Beanilla.com’s recent launch ofSpiceJungle.com is a good example of this.

Founded in 2005, Beanilla.com started with a vision of making gourmet vanilla beans more accessible and affordable to home cooks. Their new SpiceJungle site offers more than 400 spice and herb products in both bulk and retail, plus fun and informative content that makes for extremely engaging reading and browsing. Founder and CEO Rob Conley says the company is looking to expand beyond the baking community “to appeal to a broader audience of consumers who buy cooking ingredients on the Internet.”

The Bigger Picture 

We expect the growth of specialized foods/consumable sites to impact the profitability of larger retailers, because the growth and evolution of companies like Beanilla.com are making it easier for more households to change the way they shop for food and consumables. 

It’s happening with routinely purchased products, which are now easily available through subscription. It’s also happening with new products and products that have a high degree of ego involvement – and because these inevitably fall into the long tail for large retailers, they don’t usually get much attention from them. On these more specialized sites like SpiceJungle, shoppers can both find what they’re looking for more easily and build their purchasing confidence by reading product reviews by “people like themselves.”