How Universal Yums Scaled a $40M Snack Subscription with WooCommerce

Getting to $40M with a Lean Tech Team

Universal Yums began as a passion project that spanned just two co-founders and a WordPress site ten years ago. Today, it runs on WooCommerce, handling more than 100,000 active subscribers across two major e-commerce peaks each year. While a small group—three engineers in-house plus remote contractors—oversees the code, the company ships more than 30 orders per minute on sale days, fueled by a custom plugin and a smart hosting setup.

Crafting a Custom WooCommerce Stack

To handle subscription complexity, the team built a large MU plugin inside WordPress that orchestrates subscription options: box sizes, term length, and the first country selection. Checkout pages integrate shipping choices, dates, and gift options. Instead of letting each partner pull data, Universal Yums created a separate Laravel data service that pulls orders from WooCommerce and pushes them to systems like Fulfil and Klaviyo, defending the site from accidental overload.

Mastering Global Snack Logistics

Sourcing snacks from ten countries every month involves factory leads of up to six months, wrapper redesign for FDA compliance, and sticker updates when necessary. A dedicated procurement team manages shipments from factories to ports, reroutes containers when borders clog, and plans chocolate traffic by region. Products have shelf life constraints—teams juggle expiration dates, donate unsold items, or responsibly destroy them to stay ahead of spoilage.

Scaling Performance & Orders

High-volume peaks—renewal days and holiday gift seasons—can flood the dashboard and email landing pages. Early tradeoffs included hacks like reusing columns in the posts table to speed queries. Once High Performance Order Storage launched, many of these hacks could be removed. Transients cache renewal batches, and managed hosting with powerful caching layers helps deliver a landing page to half a million email recipients without a hitch. On renewal days, it processes up to 10,000 orders per hour.

Deep Engagement with Open Source

When an edge-case bug in High Performance Order Storage surfaced at scale, the WooCommerce team jumped in to diagnose and fix it. This open source model lets Universal Yums ship patches locally, avoid vendor lock in, and return fixes upstream. That kind of freedom and support meant they can keep moving fast without waiting on a closed SaaS provider.

Expanding Beyond DTC

With DTC subscription solidified, the next frontier is retail partnerships. Crafting snack packs for shelf display will require packaging tweaks, fresh pricing strategies, and backend adjustments to support single-purchase SKUs alongside subscriptions. Lessons learned on caching, performance, and data orchestration on WooCommerce will carry over as they test new channels.