Behind the Cart: Inside Universal Yums’ $40M subscription box business with CTO Devin Price

Welcome to Behind the Cart, a series where we sit down with the people behind the brands built with Woo. We’ll explore their businesses and personal journeys, hear about the technology behind the cart, and get an inside look at how they’re navigating the ever-evolving world of commerce.

Meet Universal Yums, the subscription box that delivers international snacks and cultural experiences right to your doorstep. What started as an idea sparked by a study abroad trip has turned into a $40 million business with over nine (and now ten, at the time of publishing) million orders shipped.

At the helm of Universal Yums’ technology team is Devin Price, Head of Engineering. Based in Austin, Texas, Devin brings 15+ years of WordPress experience to the table (WordPress folks may even recognize him as the creator of Options Framework).

In this episode, Devin chats with Beau Lebens, Artistic Director at Woo, and Tamara Niesen, CMO at Woo, about building a custom data layer, the complexity of shipping food, and how Devin’s dealt with hitting ten million orders.

You can watch the video here or on the WooCommerce Youtube channel. Highlights of the interview transcript are featured below and have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tamara: Devin, before we get into Universal Yums, can you tell us a little about yourself and your role?

Devin: Yeah! I live in Austin, Texas — joining you from there today. I’ve been Head of Engineering at Universal Yums for a little over four years now. It’s a great role and a great-sized company. I get to work closely with product, marketing, and of course my engineering team. We build out the website at Universal Yums and handle all the technical pieces that come with that.

Before this, I’ve been in various roles — everything from big public companies like Demand Media to small startups like CrateJoy, which was another subscription commerce company. I’ve also been involved in WordPress for quite a while. People who’ve been around the community a long time might remember Options Framework, which I released about 15 or 16 years ago. That was actually a fork of WooThemes’ old options framework they used in their themes back in the day — which was great!

Tamara: Universal Yums is such an amazing organization, bringing joy to millions of customers. The last number I saw was over nine million orders shipped. For anyone who might be new to your brand, can you share a little more about Universal Yums?

Devin: Universal Yums is about ten years old now. We’re actually coming up on our ten year anniversary in September. The core idea really came from Monique, one of our co-founders. She studied abroad in China during college, and it was a formative experience. She got to meet so many people, learn about a completely different culture — and of course, try lots of food. She came back to the U.S. thinking about how cool that experience was, and how many people around her hadn’t had that opportunity.

This was also right when subscription commerce was starting to take off. Birchbox and others had just launched. So Monique had this idea: What if we could give people in the U.S. that same kind of cultural experience, through food? That’s where Universal Yums came from.

Every month, we send out a box featuring snacks from a different country. And when you open the box, there’s a booklet that talks about the country, with quizzes and games. A lot of families open it together and make an experience out of it. It’s about exploration, experience, and food. That box is still our core product, and over the years we’ve added a few more things around it.

Beau: How big is the team these days?

Devin: Eli, one of our co-founders, actually built the first version of the website almost ten years ago on WordPress. He managed it himself for the first few years. Then, as the business grew, they brought in an agency. I joined four years ago as the first in-house engineering hire, and we’ve slowly built things up from there.

Until very recently, our in-house engineering team was just three people — me and two others. We also work with two fantastic contractors, one in Croatia and one in Slovenia, who help give us more capacity.

Beyond engineering, we’ve got a marketing team, which includes design, and a product team that works on ideas for new experiences and products on the site. But yeah, pretty lean overall.

Beau: That’s impressive, considering the size of the business and customer base you’re supporting.

Devin: We’re about a $40 million-a-year business, and we have over 100,000 subscribers. The holiday season is huge for us because of all the gift giving, so things really ramp up then. Our in-house team is around 30 people. Then we have a warehouse team that’s about 20, which we scale up during the holidays as well.

Beau: Can you walk us through your tech stack? What’s Universal Yums running on?

Devin: We use a managed host and the site is built with WordPress and WooCommerce. We’ve got a couple of plugins, of course, but we also have a big MU [must-use] plugin where we keep all our custom functionality. It’s pretty extensive.

The checkout flow is custom. Customers need to select a box size, the length of their subscription, and their first destination country. On top of that, we have lots of customizations on the checkout page — things like shipping options and delivery dates.

We also send data out to third parties. Our warehouse management system is called Fulfil. We also use Klaviyo for email marketing, and we send data to Meta for ads. 

We really wanted to manage the flow of information or of data.  

— Devin Price, CTO, Universal Yums

We’ve built a custom data service in Laravel to manage all that data flow.

Early on, one of our shipping providers was pulling our order data constantly, and it was basically like a DDoS attack. So we decided we needed to control the flow of information. That’s when we built our own data service. It pulls data off WooCommerce and pushes it to third parties rather than have them constantly pull our data.

Beau: Running a subscription box is one thing. Running one that ships food internationally sounds like a whole other level of complexity. What’s that like?  

Devin: I joke with our CEO that he’s trying to build the most complex business possible! Every part of it adds complexity.

Just the logistics of sourcing from all these different countries, getting it into the United States, and going through that, is huge.

— Devin Price, CTO, Universal Yums

We source products from all over the world, and that means supplier relationships in lots of different countries. We have a dedicated procurement team that works on this. There’s a six-month lead time.

The FDA has a lot of rules about what can go into food. And so we have a compliance team that makes sure everything that’s going in there is compliant. The ingredient information needs to meet U.S. ingredient labeling requirements, so a lot of times we have to have them update their wrappers so they can print the wrappers either in English and with the right measurements and everything, or if they can’t do that it needs to come into the United States and we need to sticker it, over so that it has all the right ingredients.

Then you’ve got to get everything from the factory onto a truck, onto a boat; we need to figure out which shipping channels it needs to go through. During the pandemic, getting product on boats was harder and more expensive. Sometimes the borders are backed up, like when Ukraine’s border to Poland was delayed five days. So we had to reroute. It’s a huge logistics puzzle.

And chocolate! We plan chocolate from countries like Belgium, Germany, Switzerland for winter, and countries like Brazil and Colombia for summer.

Plus, food expires. You have to move quickly, pay attention to expiration dates, and if something doesn’t sell, you either donate it or destroy it. It’s a super complex business for sure.

Beau: How much of all of those logistics is integrated or flows through the WooCommerce site itself, do you have other systems managing those logistics?

Devin: Most of the inventory management happens outside WooCommerce. Fulfill handles purchase orders and inventory, and we’re looking at adding another layer for better forecasting.

WooCommerce manages the products when they’re ready to sell. We have a custom post type that defines all our boxes — the dates they’re available, whether they contain chocolate, that sort of thing. That data feeds into checkout and renewals.

Beau: You mentioned processing 30 orders per minute during big sale days. How has it been scaling on WooCommerce over the years?

Devin: It’s been a fun ride! When I first joined, someone was exporting all our orders to a spreadsheet and importing them into ShipStation. That took hours, and as we grew, it became unsustainable. So we built our data service to automate all that. We do a lot of stuff in our data service, which is built on Marvell. There’s probably other ways we could have done that, like used the action scheduler to push stuff out or think through other ways of doing it. 

Our customer dashboard slowed down as we hit four or five million orders because it was a big query and it had to do a lot of joins on metadata. We had to do some hacks — like reusing columns in the post table — to speed up queries. We were very excited when High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) came out. We’ve now rolled back a bunch of those hacks because HPOS made things a lot faster.

I think people starting a store today or scaling a store today probably don’t need to be as worried about some of that stuff. There’s just random things that happen when we send out an email to half a million people or whatnot and we want to have a really solid landing page that’s cached. We use transients a lot to store  temporary data, but that we don’t want to be querying constantly.

Today we process 10,000 renewals an hour on renewal days. WooCommerce can scale — you just need solid hosting and smart engineering.

Tamara: Any big bets or experiments on the horizon?

Devin: We’re starting to explore retail partnerships with some big national retailers. Some customers don’t want a subscription, but if they see our product on a shelf, they might pick it up. It’s a new channel for us, and we’ll probably have to iterate on the product to find what works in retail versus DTC.

Tamara: What’s it been like working with the WooCommerce team?

Devin: We’re running on open source software, so we don’t expect much support. But the WooCommerce team has been great. When we had a HPOS bug early on — they jumped in right away. One of the HPOS engineers figured out how to reproduce it and fixed it. It was really an edge case thing that happens at really high scale on renewals and they were super supportive and in tracing that down and they put a fix in.

Meanwhile, we patched WooCommerce core ourselves to solve it immediately.

That’s the beauty of open source. If we were on Shopify, we’d be stuck waiting. But we can patch our stack and keep things moving. And now WooCommerce is better for everyone.

The team has reached out every now and then to check on how things are going. It’s always been super supportive. 

Beau: It may be an edge case for you, but it turns out when you’ve got millions of merchants doing all sorts of  weird and wonderful things with your software, that edge cases often don’t end up being that edge after all.

Devin: Yeah. I can imagine all the different use cases for WooCommerce from rentals to memberships, there’s just so many  companies using it in so many different ways. We’re doing high scale subscriptions and we had our little snags there.  It’s a lot of surface area to cover for your team.

Beau: One of the things that really opened my eyes when I started working on WooCommerce five years ago was just the sheer diversity of what people are doing with. It is beyond anything I had ever imagined, that’s for sure.

Tamara: Any insights you’d like to share to anyone listening?

Devin: I think the subscription model is like a really fun model. Subscriptions are a great model if you can make them work. Predictable recurring revenue helps smooth out any business.

And then in terms of WooCommerce we’ve built a really huge business on it. You get full control of your stack, you can negotiate better rates with payment providers, and you’re not paying margins to a third party. You own every aspect of it. We’re on WooCommerce so we can really customize and make a great experience. It’s a fun platform to build on.

Tamara: Most popular snack?

Devin: Depends on the box! Recently, rhubarb custard bonbons from our UK box were a favorite. PopSmile popcorn from Taiwan is also super popular — unique flavors like egg yolk.

Tamara: Most controversial snack?

Devin: Definitely durian. People either love it or hate it. We intentionally include polarizing snacks. Licorice is another one — some people love it, others can’t stand it.

If you want to learn more about Universal Yums or see what’s in their latest box, head to universalyums.com.

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.