Thrive Market

These companies use the creative forces of capitalism to solve big problems—and do well by doing good.

<p>Online grocers have the potential to bring better nutrition to “food deserts” in lower-income communities where supermarkets are few. But the e-markets’ own products are sometimes prohibitively expensive. Thrive Market, an online organic and non-GMO grocer that works on a paid membership model, has worked to bridge that gap: Last year, it became the first online-only retailer to accept SNAP EBT payments in all lower 48 states, and its 1.7 million paid members now include thousands of SNAP households. The company also recently took aim at childhood obesity with an effort called “Back to Healthy” that involved distributing more than 1 million snack packs to families in their customer base.
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Thrive Market | Fortune

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Before Thrive Market, “accidental entrepreneur” Nick Green ran his first business from a Harvard dorm room.

Thrive Market’s millennial CEO on building a "Costco model" for healthy eating

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It sounds terrible to say this, but the way I described that first entrepreneurial journey was failing my way to success. I made every mistake in the book from bad hires to micromanaging to operational mistakes. My name is Nick Green, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, and this is my secret to success. I grew up middle class in middle America. I had a mom who grew up in a large Mexican American family and kind of saw firsthand in her family the facts of lifestyle diseases related to diet, and my mom, this is, you know, again 90s in Minnesota, had this vision for basically charting a different course for our family and then I got to see how hard she had to work to make that possible. So we were that weird house on the block that had no sugared cereal. No soda. I saw her driving across town to find healthier options. I saw her clipping coupons to make it all work on a budget, so it was really seared into my brain at an early age that being healthy is important, but being healthy costs money. My first ever job was actually starting my first company. After doing really well on the SAT, I started teaching SAT classes in high school. And that evolved into my first business when I was an undergrad at Harvard called ID Insiders. So I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I didn't think about it as starting a business at the time, but it was really interesting as an entrepreneur running my business in parallel. A lot of what I was learning in the business, it was kind of unlearning things I had learned in school and so probably the biggest lesson that I learned as an entrepreneur during those four years was that the path to success is really littered with failure. And you know, a lot of it was thinking that because I was the expert on the content of what we delivered the test prep, that I would also be the expert on the business. So early on I was trying to do everything myself. I was just learning through my own mistakes. We got bought 3 years later by another test prep company and then you know in the back half of that year sort of looking at what my next thing was going to be and I knew I wanted to do something that could have even more scale potential and more impact and so I met Ginard, my first co-founder. Very randomly we got introduced through a friend. He pitched me initially as an angel investor, and he had this big idea to make healthy living accessible to anybody by bringing a Groupon like buying event model to healthy nutritious food. By the end of the meeting, I was basically pitching him on like let's do something together in this space. I don't know about Groupon for Healthy food. Let's whiteboard this a bit, and two weeks later we are iterating on different ways that we might be able to approach affordability. And that was when we stumbled into the Costco model and how powerful membership could be as a way to bring prices down, create engagement, create community. We had some real challenges from the get-go in fundraising, talked to 50+ VCs, all of whom rejected us. We had some real challenges in building the site. Neither of us had a technology background, but looking back on it, I think the thing that really kept us going was that strength of the mission. We knew the mission from day one. And it was our North Star and the way I described my first company at IB Insiders was I was kind of on a roller coaster. And even though I was buckled in, I didn't know it. So every time we hit a turn, I thought I was going to fall out. I think the difference with Tri Market was having, you know, done a startup before. I knew I had a seat belt on and I knew that a lot can go wrong and you can still figure it out. And so what we're trying to do is offer a solution so that you don't have to just go to what's closest to you. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg to afford the price premiums for healthy products in those grocery stores. Our mission since day one has been to make healthy sustainable living easy, affordable and accessible to anyone. So we started a petitioning the USDA back in 2016 to accept food stamps online. Fast forward eight years we became the first pure play e-commerce retailer to be able to accept Snap and EBT online. So there are a number of barriers to getting healthy and what we found is that price is a very important barrier, but I would say the biggest barrier actually. is more around the difficulty of knowing how to navigate this landscape of healthy food and in some ways the internet has made that more treacherous because you've got, you know, people from every different direction giving health advice, you've got Companies that have products that probably aren't healthy but are marketing them as healthy and so I think many, many people are just plain confused. I like, do I want to eat more meat or less meat? Is fat bad or carbs bad? Does organic matter or doesn't it matter? And it's enough to make someone's head spin. And so a lot of what we're doing at Thrive is making that process easier by letting people outsource their trust to us so that they know every product reaches this high bar of quality that we are 100% focused on making the product safe, sourcing them ethically so that you can feel good and proud of whatever you buy, and so we're really proud of what we've achieved over the last 10 years and yet at the same time we're very cognizant. That we are just getting started. There are 100 million US households, we only have 1.5 million members. We are doing hundreds of millions in sales, but there is a $1 trillion CPG market and from a mission standpoint, we have so much further that we can go to truly make healthy living easy, affordable and accessible. So we are really excited to reach a milestone, but also even more excited about what the future holds and knowing that we are still in the early innings.

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