Rutgers students open snacking subscription service

If a trip to the local convenience store is not feasible, students can now have their snacks delivered.

A group of first-year entrepreneurs have started a snack subscriptions service called The Plug Box.

Kwaku Agyemang, a School of Arts and Sciences first-year student, Haris Memon, a student at Brown University and Mubarak Olukotun, a student at Yale University, run the business at their respective universities.

The service is a bi-weekly snack-delivery service. Through The Plug Box website, students create a “plug” where they select three snacks out of an array of several snacks to be delivered to their dorms for a fee of $10, Agyemang said.

This service differs from traditional vending, because snacks come in bulk as opposed to single packages. For example, if a student chooses fruit snacks as one of their three options, they will receive a box with 10 fruit-snack packages.

All three students attended Piscataway High School. The idea for a snack subscription service emerged after discovering a service that delivered groceries to people’s homes.

We thought this type of service could be useful on a college campus and we wanted Rutgers to be the test launch for the service, Agyemang said.

Agyemang receives the snacks from a wholesale food service and stores them in his dorm room. When he receives an order he puts the snacks together and delivers them personally.

We are looking to expand in many ways, he said.

“We are trying to have this at every college, not just at Rutgers, Brown and Yale,” he said.

Looking forward, Agyemang hopes to hire a staff to deliver boxes, to move from a bi-weekly delivery to providing snacks on a weekly basis and promoting this service to athletic teams specifically.

Currently, Agyemang is limited by the amount of space he can use, he said. He hopes to expand into perishable offerings in the future.

Their primary forms of marketing have been word-of-mouth and social media like Twitter and Facebook, he said.

Jessica Amoako, a School of Arts and Sciences first-year student and a subscriber to The Plug Box, said it is a great idea because the subscriber receives a mixture of snacks.

"When I only get one type of snack, it is easy to become bored with it. I can eat something different everyday," Amoako said.

The service makes grocery shopping easy and less expensive for students.

But adding more vegan and gluten-free options for those who abide by specific dietary standards would expand the number of subscribers to The Plug Box, she said.

“The fact he delivers it by hand (also) gives (the service) a personal kind of feel,” Amoaka said.

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Francesca Petrucci is a School of Arts and Sciences first-year student. She is a contributing writer for The Daily Targum. Find her on Twitter @TheFranWeekly for more.