Performance Tea is a line of instant functional, adaptogenic tea blends that provide an alternative to coffee without jitters or crashes. Founded in 2017 by Paolo Stuppa, Marco Lam, and Joe Gagnon, Performance Tea was on a mission to find a natural way to fuel athletic endeavours. Joe Gagnon tested the functionality of the blends when he ran six marathons in six consecutive days on six continents--he needed every advantage he could get. “I was setting out to take on a big challenge in 2017, which was to run a marathon in six continents and six days, and I met this guy, Paolo, who had been working on some herbal tea supplements that would help with endurance, and so I decided to try the energy blend,” said Joe. “By the time I finished doing the six days running across the world, which is 37000 miles of flying, 157 miles of running, and just 12 hours of sleep in a week, I felt good. Good enough to keep running the next day and I said, ‘we've got to make this product available to other people.’”

Compared to other supplements on the market, Performance Tea stands out because it’s a healthy combination of green tea and adaptogens designed to allow the body and mind to perform at its best. “The truth is that a lot of what we take in and supplements or chemicals or sugar and ours are just plant ­based, we use these herbs called adaptogens. We've evolved into using CBD, which is another plant-based supplement,” explained Joe. “We turned it into powders, which makes it really simple, to add it to cold water and you have a very healthy drink that can complement the activities you're doing.” Making this product readily available to the right customers was the goal, but as a relatively new product, Performance Tea wanted to build a community around their brand, and SnackMagic was their ticket into a worldwide at-home market. “Even though people don't know about our products, they're easy to understand and have clear benefits. We see some people are buying brands of water and chips and that’s all very familiar, so new products have to sort of have an ability to create community.” As a platform designed for discovery, SnackMagic was the ideal solution for Performance Tea to build their brand effectively by reaching their niche audience. 

Coping with the challenges presented by COVID-19, Performance Tea--like many CPG brands--had to quickly pivot their distribution strategy to adjust to the “new normal” of the industry. Large retailers started to prioritize essential products over speciality products and the space for niche brands was becoming increasingly smaller. “We were dealing with this COVID-19 demand and had slowly been making a big push into retail. Speciality retail closed down almost everywhere, so we were looking for partnerships that were going to match the new lifestyle that people have,” said Joe. Performance Tea had originally approached SnackMagic’s parent company, STADIUM, where a lot of business was coming from add-on snacks. Once STADIUM made the transition from delivering customized lunches to delivering custom snack boxes with SnackMagic, Performance Tea was quick to get on board. We jumped right on the SnackMagic opportunity because you just knew that this idea was so easy and so powerful that we wanted to be part of it.”

SnackMagic is a unique retail channel because we are not a huge corporation. With a small team and a start-up attitude, the SnackMagic model is attractive to other small CPG businesses who are seeking the individual attention and care that larger retailers can not. “I think the team for SnackMagic is very appealing 'cause it's creative, dynamic, inspired and just can-­do people,” said Joe. “The vision was powerful, this custom stack box. Using both corporate as well as other techniques to capture customers, and that was really appealing.” With many different use cases, whether it’s a virtual event, an employee benefits program, or a client appreciation gift, SnackMagic provides a dynamic network of customers to participating brand partners. Moreover, because SnackMagic is a gifting service, people are shopping on our site with the purpose of discovery, which encourages more impulse purchases. “I think new brands struggle in retail...In this setting, you give people a little bit of time to look, read, maybe even do some other research if they were curious. While we think that impulse purchases work in retail, that real estate is expensive or limited, so we wanted to do so in places where that works for us.”

As one of the first brand partners we brought on, Performance Tea has become one of our most successful products. “I feel like sometimes I am privileged. We were in at an early time with SnackMagic. We got to know the CPG team, and they’ve treated us very well and are always responsive,” said Joe. With an entire section of our menu devoted to performance and endurance products, Performance Tea fit like a puzzle piece with our many other pairable products. 

Essentially acting as a sampling box, the customization of each box allows customers who are seeking specific types of products to try brands they haven’t heard of before so they may, at some point, order directly from that brand in bulk. “I think SnackMagic just fits better with the profile of our customer we're looking for, right, 'cause you can place it with other products...and you can even buy that Boxed Water and add in our products.” Moreover, SnackMagic is an ideal CPG platform because we provide real-time data with full transparency. brand partners can actively check their inventory and metrics on our portal, which is a unique feature that larger retailers don’t have. “We see the success in our results. I track our products on SnackMagic day by day, and even just in the past two weeks, we went from 1400 units in a rolling 30 ­day to now 1950 units and a rolling 30 day. So, it's gone up like crazy, I would say, Oh, we'll get to 2000 in a while, and it just happened in two weeks. That’s just amazing growth.” As an industry leader in the at-home CPG retail space, SnackMagic is an outlet for brands who want to evolve at a rapid pace, just like we have done in the past 6 months. “You guys are growing, I feel we’ll grow well with you, but I have been thrilled with the performance.”