August 7, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
This week, I signed a contract to build a feature I had spent two months calling a nice-to-have. But a new benchmark showed me it’s not just a feature; it’s what separates two completely different businesses.
On paper, the feature seems small. You tap a jar, and that exact blend is reordered with one action. There’s no login, no cart, and no searching through menus. I had it in the middle of the roadmap, under ‘would be nice once the important stuff ships.’ It just felt like an extra touch.
But when the 2026 subscription numbers came in, my plans changed. Replenishment subscriptions, like coffee, pet food, and supplements, tend to have a lower churn rate of 4 to 7 percent a month, retaining about 45 percent of subscribers after a year. In contrast, curation subscriptions, such as meal kits and snack boxes, have a higher churn rate of 12 to 18 percent a month. Although they target the same customers, curation subscriptions lose customers at about three times the rate. Additionally, early numbers show that 60 to 70 percent of subscribers stop after their first three orders, with around 44 percent of cancellations occurring within the first 90 days.
Here’s what made me think. Spice is used up and bought again, making it replenishable. You cook with it, it runs out, and you restock based on your cooking habits. However, my subscription feels like a curated box with five signature blends and special limited offerings. People treat it like coffee, but the packaging resembles a meal kit. Studies show that packaging impacts customer turnover more than the product itself. I created a replenishable product, but packaged it like something that has a much faster turnover.
The reorder feature is what changes one business model into the other. It’s not just a finishing touch. It’s the one thing that lets a customer reorder right when they run out, without having to decide again if they want a subscription. That’s the difference between a business with 12 to 18 percent churn and one with 4 to 7 percent. I thought it was just a convenience, but it’s actually the retention model.
The key takeaway for founders or product managers regarding their roadmap is to avoid ranking features based on meeting impressions. Instead, prioritize them by their impact on retention. A flashy feature might look appealing, but only the one that truly reduces churn is valuable to the business.
If you have a subscription business, do this today: note if your product is used regularly or for special occasions. Then identify one feature that could help reduce your churn rate to your goal. Focus on building that first. I’m following this advice too, though a bit late, as I’ve already signed the contract.
Spice Route Signal
This month, the big companies focused on buying up the ingredients side of the business and adding AI to it. But none of what they bought involves building a relationship with home cooks.
There were two big moves in the same week, both heading in the same direction. Ingredion launched an AI tool at a major food-science conference to help food companies decide what goes into their products, as reported in early August. Just days before, Tate & Lyle shareholders approved Ingredion’s roughly £2.7 billion acquisition of another major ingredients company. Add that to the McCormick and Unilever foods merger announced in the spring—a $44.8 billion deal with about $20 billion in combined annual revenue, set to close in mid-2027. The trend is clear: the big players are consolidating the ingredients side, and the AI they’re introducing is just an interface to their own data.
If you’re a small food business, all this might sound intimidating. But it shouldn’t. Notice what these deals don’t touch. An AI tool helps the company that owns it speed up R&D. A $45 billion merger brings more scale, shelf space, and distribution. Both moves are business-to-business: ingredients go to manufacturers, and manufacturers sell to retailers. None of this builds a relationship with a home cook who cares about where their food comes from and reorders because they trust the story. The big companies are focused on what happens before the kitchen. I’m focused on what happens inside it.
That gap won’t last forever, and I’m not pretending it will. Big companies eventually reach the end customer. But right now, the biggest and best-funded players are investing in parts of the business that never connect with the person eating dinner. The flavor and culture layer they’re ignoring is exactly where a small brand with real relationships can grow. The key is to recognize this and build quickly, while the big companies are focused on merging.
[Source: Ingredion AI formulation tool launched at IFT FIRST 2026, via FoodNavigator, August 4 2026; Tate & Lyle shareholder vote on the ~£2.7bn Ingredion acquisition, FoodNavigator, July 28 2026; McCormick-Unilever foods combination ~$44.8bn / ~$20bn combined revenue, close expected mid-2027, per company filings via CNBC and StockTitan.]
From the Trenches
I finally hired a developer to build the tap feature. I have a thousand finished tags sitting on my desk. But the one part the whole plan depends on still isn’t working.
Let’s start with the real progress, because there’s a lot this week. After a search that took much longer than I expected, I signed a fixed-price contract with a developer to build the tap-to-story feature. Work starts right away. This was the biggest open item on my list since the quarter began, and now it’s done.
Before hiring anyone, I tested the tag validation myself, and I’m glad I did. I used eight phones, ran ten trials for each condition, and did 160 attempts with two jars side by side. Every tap opened the right jar’s page no mix-ups or confusion between jars. I also learned two new things: older phones can’t read the tags in the background, so there’s a minimum device requirement, and the screen has to be awake for the tap to work. Both of these affect what goes on the packaging. It’s much better to find this out in testing than from a customer.
The thousand tags arrived, all inspected and correct, each with the fox logo printed on them. They’re sitting on my desk as inventory. And inventory brings its own quiet pressure, because a box of tags that don’t go anywhere is just stickers.
The main issue is that production isn’t starting yet. The contract is signed, but we haven’t defined or scheduled the first milestone, and I need to clarify what ‘done’ means for the developer. This is my task for the week, and I keep putting it off. There’s also a financial issue: a deposit has left my account but hasn’t cleared, which is delaying the lid and the start of the twenty-day production clock. Additionally, I have a few vendor confirmations ready but haven’t sent them, and I can’t explain the delay.
From the Rack
Cumin is the most-used spice you never think about. Saffron is the one everybody remembers. The humble one is the better business.
Cumin is the backbone of North African Night Market, and it earns that place by being everywhere. Toast the whole seeds in a dry pan for thirty seconds, until they darken and the kitchen fills with a warm, nutty, slightly smoky aroma, and you’ll see why it’s in so many different cuisines. It gets used all the time, so it runs out all the time. You reach for it, run low, and buy more. That’s the whole cycle.
Now compare that to saffron, the highlight of Persian Sunrise. Saffron is unforgettable: floral, honeyed, and more valuable by weight than almost anything else in your kitchen. But you buy a little for a special dish, and the rest sits in your cabinet for a year. You remember saffron, but you keep buying cumin.
Here’s the lesson from the spice rack: price and prestige don’t tell you much about whether you have a good business. How often people use your product tells you everything. The plain product that gets used up regularly brings customers back on a schedule, and that’s where the money adds up. The fancy product bought for special occasions sells once and then sits. If you’re building something with recurring revenue, don’t chase the expensive, memorable item. Find your cumin. The simple thing people buy again and again is worth more than the beautiful thing they buy once.
On My Desk
The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow.
If you liked The Take, this is the book behind it. Warrillow argues that the most valuable customers are the ones who buy again automatically, without having to decide each time. The subscription model you choose shapes your whole company more than the product itself. He lists the different types of subscriptions, and reading it while looking at my own churn numbers made the difference between replenishment and curation feel less like a benchmark and more like a choice I’d already made without realizing.
What stands out is his point that recurring revenue is something you build, not just luck. The simple mechanics, the reorder process, and the timing that makes it easy to buy again are the real product in a subscription business. The flavor brings people in, but the mechanics keep them coming back.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #19. I’m Dan Blizinski, founder of Trevean Spice and the person behind The Product Manager’s Journal, where I write about PM frameworks grounded in actually building things, not just theorizing about them.
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