In the last few months, you may have seen undergrads at Princeton, University of Michigan, or Berkeley leave restaurants with bags tagged with sky blue stickers. Their food was ordered through Snackpass, a student-founded startup. With its focus on college students, Snackpass has socialized the experience of ordering food. It offers food pickup with campus restaurants and provides students with the opportunity to share and receive gifts, all the while viewing their friends’ activity. In a crowded market of food delivery, Snackpass has cracked the code in marketing to their college audience, and investors have noticed – most recently, Andreessen Horowitz invested in Snackpass’s Series A. Business Today speaks with Claudia Haimovici, Growth Marketing Manager, to learn about their plans for further expansion and the student founder experience. 

On every campus, Snackpass assigns a campus director, a content curator, and a set of campus ambassadors. The director serves as the general liaison between Snackpass and the campus ambassadors, who are students heavily involved in different groups on campus and equally represent the Snackpass brand. Curators use their videography and photography skills for weekly food photoshoots. These go up on Snackpass’s social media, which attracts a national audience. What’s interesting about these student-led programs is that Snackpass seeks to help students gain more professional credibility through these roles. For instance, through their food photos, curators are given photo credit, which is helpful for reference in a marketing internship. Growing the number of Snackpass users is also not an easy feat, but if done well, a campus director or ambassador could mention it as a resume line. This focus on students likely emanates from Snackpass’s nature being a student-founded and student-run startup. Its team knows how to get students on board as directors, curators, and ambassadors, and it’s consequently seen great success penetrating the college food take-out market.

Snackpass currently operates across eleven colleges (Yale, Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, MIT, BC, Northeastern, Michigan, UC Berkeley) from coast to coast of the United States. At its founding, it had spread through the founding team’s connections with friends at other universities, but as it seeks to expand even further to campuses in which connections aren’t as easily accessible, they aim to connect with clubs including those interested in documenting food, like Spoon University. Over the next two years, Snackpass hopes to be in more than 100 colleges across the United States, and afterwards target cities. 

Snackpass’s focus on colleges is intentional. Unlike cities, in which there is a diverse body of individuals, college campuses are environments in which everyone is close in age and live in a close-knit, social community. The fact that sharing gifts with friends is viewable to others makes Snackpass operate, in some sense, more closely to a social network, popular on campuses in which gossip is constantly rampant. 

However, as Snackpass seeks to grow their brand, a question they’ve sought to address is the temporality of college. Every year, a quarter of the students graduate. Claudia asserted that they hope to combat that attrition through developing “mature campuses.” On these campuses, “Snackpass is an inherent part of campus and the community.” The focus is placed heavily on the incoming freshmen class. At orientation, for instance, first-years recognize Snackpass as an indispensable app for their next four years of college. As for the graduating class, Claudia points out that they serve as customers whose familiarity with the app will come to use when Snackpass enters the cities in which graduates work. All in all, Snackpass doesn’t plan on losing much market value on mature campuses.

The most impressive aspect of Snackpass, however, is that it continues to be run by a team of young, driven students and recent grads. With an environment free for testing new ideas, Snackpass provides an exciting work environment. One of Claudia’s favorite memories is her first free giveaway at University of Pennsylvania. Handing out almost 1000 acai bowls, Snackpass attracted 3000 sign-ups in just a few days. With an environment encouraging experimentation, Snackpass has drawn success.

In sharing her experience working at a startup, Claudia adds, "You're able to learn how to thrive in a leadership role right out of college, which is something that is more difficult to find within a large corporation." For students looking into the startup world, her tip of advice is to “Choose a startup that you’re passionate about.” In her personal journey, while her major was political science, her hobbies and passions lay in food, which she exercised through her own food blog. As for her, “My hobby ended up becoming my job.” 

No doubt, there’s plenty of room for growth for Snackpass. In the next couple years, we’ll look forward to seeing it take hold at even more college campuses to simplify the food takeout process for a greater number of students, and throughout this expansion, it’ll maintain its vitality as a student-led business.