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Off Brand
We Have Officially Hit Peak Subscription
If Panera thinks it can sell $8.99 subscriptions, who can’t?
Would you subscribe to a coffee? No, not a monthly box of fancy ground coffee in the mail — although obviously that’s a thing. What about an everyday cup of coffee from a mass-casual chain. Like Panera. Because now that’s a thing, too.
If you “subscribe” to MyPanera+ Coffee, for $8.99 a month, you get unlimited coffee (or tea) at the pervasive sandwich chain. Panera CEO Niren Chaudhary told Business Insider that this subscription experiment may be just the beginning. “We have started the journey off with coffee, but we are going to be watching very carefully what kinds of food attachments are happening,” he said. (By “food attachments” he evidently means: What edible items are customers buying with their coffee?)
Lately, it seems that everyone has jumped on the subscription-based business bandwagon. Software publishers like Adobe and Microsoft have successfully moved from selling users a product to in effect requiring them to subscribe to a service. Trendy e-commerce subscription businesses delivering monthly boxes of pet toys or meal kits or wine have grown to become an estimated $10 billion category. Plus, you can subscribe to a regularly updated heap of movies and shows from Netflix, music from Spotify, exercise programs from Peloton, clothing from Rent the Runway, or news and information from many digital descendants of periodical publications that essentially invented the idea of “pay me on a recurring basis for an ever-changing and refreshed version of the same thing.”
Maybe you’d rather have a coffee subscription from Starbucks, or subscribe to salads at Sweetgreen, or get a burrito subscription from Chipotle.
“Consumers continue to exhibit a willingness to set up fixed payments for everything from data plans and streaming content to fashion and food,” says David Portalatin, a vice president and food industry adviser at research firm NPD Group. And lately the experimentation with this model seems to have gotten simultaneously more adventurous, more mainstream — and, in this case of Panera coffee, perhaps more…
