Note: Cooks Venture has gone out of business.
Are you curious about how the best meat delivery services stack up against each other? We reviewed Cooks Venture Vs Butcher Box to see how they compared.Â
We looked at each company in terms of subscription offers, variety, quality, sourcing, price, and more. Both companies have things in common. For example, they both offer high-quality meat, they offer grass-fed & grass-finished beef and free-range chicken, and ship their frozen meat packed in dry ice. Now that we mentioned some similarities, let’s look at the differences.
Cooks Venture
Pros
- Works with small farms
- Offers pasture-raised beef and chicken, plus heritage pork
- Choose what goes into your subscription boxes
Cons
- Limited variety
- No curated boxes
- Limited, if any, seafood is available
Butcher Box
Pros
- Publishes an annual Social & Environmental Responsibility report
- Great variety of grass-fed and grass-finished beef
- Long-standing reputation in the meat delivery industry
- Affordable
Cons
- Custom options cost more
- Limited seafood
Subscription Boxes
When you have meat delivered, you’ll choose which meat subscription box best fits your lifestyle – and freezer space!
Butcher Box offers four different boxes. The curated options include chicken & beef, beef & pork, or a combination of beef, chicken, and pork.
These boxes do not include any seafood items, and Butcher Box chooses the cuts for you. At this time, Butcher Box does not offer an all-beef box, but you could create one if you went with the custom option.
Once you decide which type of box you want, the next step is to choose the classic box, which is 8-14 lbs, or the large box, which includes about double the amount.
Good Chop doesn’t offer any curated boxes. Instead, they let their customers fill up each box with the selections of their choice. Some options do add to the cost of your box.
There are two sizes of boxes with Good Chop. With the regular box, you get to choose six items from the menu. The large box allows you to select twelve.
Subscription Boxes Winner
In our opinion, there are pros and cons to each of the subscription options offered by both Cooks Venture and Butcher Box. It’s always nice to be able to fill your own box, which is a plus for Cooks Venture, but Butcher Box offers a custom option, too.
In the end, we chose Butcher Box because they offer the choice between custom and curated boxes. Plus, they don’t tell you that you can choose six or twelve items and then charge you extra for some of them.
Variety
One of the reasons we prefer using meat delivery services is that we’re able to enjoy more variety than we would from our local grocery store or even someplace like Whole Foods.
With Cooks Venture, you get approximately twenty options to choose from, which includes a mix of beef, chicken, and pork. A few options on the menu include a whole chicken, boneless and skinless chicken thighs, chicken wings, chicken breast, and chicken sausages.
On the current menu for Cooks Venture, we didn’t see any seafood or less common cuts of meat, such as organ meat.
Butcher Box offers what we think of as a great variety of meat. The selections include grass-fed meat, like premium ground beef, sirloin steaks, ribeye steaks, New York strip, and roasts. There are heritage pork options (the pork tenderloin is our favorite) and free-range organic chicken, like chicken breast, chicken wings, and whole chicken.
The seafood selection isn’t huge, but it does include well-liked favorites, such as wild-caught Alaskan salmon and shrimp.
Variety Winner
When looking at just variety, Butcher Box wins by a landslide. They might not have certain higher-end options, like Japanese Wagyu beef or lobster tails, but they have just about anything else you can think of – whether it’s premium grass-fed beef, heirloom chicken breasts, whole chickens, or ground chicken, ground pork, or juicy New York strip steak.
Sourcing & Quality
As high-quality meat delivery services have become more popular, it has been great to see such a focus on sustainably and humanely raised meats.
Cooks Venture is very committed to animal welfare and working with environmentally conscious farms. Regenerative farming is very important to them, so you’ll find that your meat comes from small farms and family farms that are committed to grass-fed & grass-finished beef, pasture-raised chicken, and slow-growth heritage pork. Cooks Venture chicken is part of their Better Chicken commitment and is certified by the Global Animal Partnership.
All high-quality and pasture-raised beef, chicken, and pork from Cooks Venture is antibiotic-free and hormone-free.
ButcherBox also has a great commitment to sustainability, ethics, and high-quality products. ButcherBox offers grass-fed and grass-finished beef, humanely raised pork, pasture-raised chicken, and wild-caught seafood. They work only with farmers and ranchers that share the same ethics and standards.
ButcherBox also publishes an annual Social & Environmental Responsibility report that allows you to see a snapshot of what the company has done to support ethical and sustainable farming and sustainable business practices during the past year.
Sourcing & Quality Winner
When it comes to high-quality meats and sustainability, these two companies are pretty close to each other. They both offer grass-fed beef, sometimes organic beef, free-range chicken, and heritage breeds. We chose Butcher Box because we like that they’re working toward more transparency, and we’ve always been pleased with the meat quality.
Pricing
Cooks Venture
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CURATED BOXES | WEIGHT | PRICE PER MONTH |
Custom Box | 9-14 lbs | $169 |
Mixed Box | 8-11 lbs | $146 |
Beef & Chicken Box | 8-11 lbs | $146 |
Beef & Pork Box | 8-11 lbs | $146 |
Basic Box | 7-7.5 lbs | $99 |
When signing up for either Cooks Venture or Butcher Box, you should expect to pay more than you would at your local grocery store. You’re paying for quality, selection, and convenience, so the cost is definitely justified. However, you might be surprised to find out that quality meat delivery services aren’t priced out of most people’s budgets either.
Butcher Box’s pricing is consistent across their three curated boxes, with the custom box costing a bit more. The price of the smaller box is $146 for 9-14lbs. The large box, which contains 18-26 lbs, costs $269. This averages out to about $10-$16 per pound, depending on what’s in the box.
Good Chop offers two different-sized boxes as well – a small box and a large box. The small box, which contains six items, costs $169.99. The large box, containing twelve items, costs $299.99.
It’s much more difficult to calculate the average cost per pound with Good Chop because each box is created by the customer and varies greatly.
For example, items that are considered a single item with Good Chop include:
1 whole chicken (3-4 lbs)
3 12-oz packs chicken sausage
4 6-oz boneless pork chops
2 10-oz NY strip steaks
2 1-lb packs ground beef
However, while all of the above are considered single items, there is an additional fee for some cuts. For example, choosing the NY strips is going to add $6 to the cost of your box, while adding bacon will cost $2 more.
Pricing Winner
Overall, we think Butcher Box offers a more budget-friendly option for meat delivery, and even if you choose to create your own box, there aren’t any surprise charges for choosing your favorite cuts. You can add all premium cuts if you want, but the overall weight will be lower than if you choose a mixture of premium and standard options.
Customer Service
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Butcher Box
It’s one thing to be pleased with the quality and taste when you eat food from a company like Cooks Venture or ButcherBox, but customer service matters, too – a lot!
Details like being able to pause or skip a delivery, cancel a subscription, and be able to reach out to the customer service team and actually have your issue resolved are important. What we’ve found is that, no matter which meal delivery service you’re speaking of, you almost always hear more bad reports about customer service than you hear praises.
Personally, we were pleased with the level of customer service from both companies. We found ButcherBox to be a bit easier to manage. We then took to the internet to read reviews to learn more about other people’s experiences with ButcherBox and Cooks Venure.
ButcherBox has been around longer than Cooks Venture, which means they’ve had the opportunity to fine-tune their customer service and also receive a lot of customer service reviews – both good and negative. For the most part, ButcherBox seems to handle customer service issues relatively quickly, and most customers are satisfied.
With Cooks Venture, it’s a little more difficult to accurately access their customer service overall. We took a look at their Better Business Bureau report (both companies have reports filed), and we noticed one customer issue that stood out. A customer had an issue with the quality of meat and contacted the company. At first, Cooks Venture stated the customer didn’t request a refund and that it was also outside of their 30-day guarantee window. Fair enough.
However, the customer brought up the point that many customers won’t know the quality of all the meat in their order within that window because it’s frozen and isn’t always eaten right away, and then stated that they would like a refund. Sure, it was outside of the return window, but this complaint went to the BBB, and Cooks Venture put in some effort to counter each of the customer’s responses. The dialog went back and forth a bit.
Obviously, this customer wasn’t happy, and it felt like Cooks Venture was more concerned with being in the right than they were with trying to make the situation right with the customer. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to just issue the refund, seeing it was a legitimate complaint, even if it was outside the 30-day window. Even though we haven’t had an issue with Cooks Venture customer service, we haven’t had a need to contact them. This report just left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.
Customer Service Winner
We chose ButcherBox as the winner of this category because the accounts seem to be a bit easier to manage, and customer service is more responsive.
Winner
Butcher Box
It isn’t often that a company wins one of our comparison reviews by a landslide, but ButcherBox did it this time. This isn’t to say that Coos Venture isn’t good because they are. However, ButcherBox managed to come out on top in every category.
Which is the best meat delivery option for you? Here are some things to consider.
Choose Butcher Box if you:
- Variety is as important to you as meat quality
- Prefer curated boxes
- Want the option to include seafood
- Want premium cuts of beef, like New York strip steak
- Appreciate that ButcherBox’s meat comes from sustainable farms around the world
Choose Cooks Venture if you:
- Like knowing that your meat comes from small farms
- Want to create your own mixed box from selections that include whole chickens, ground pork, hormone-free ground beef, and more.
- Don’t mind paying extra for certain selections
- Want to support a smaller company