If you’ve been considering a meat delivery service, we’ve taken a look at two of the most popular – Wild Pastures vs. Butcher Box. We looked at everything from the type of subscriptions they offer and the variety to quality, sourcing, price, and more. In the end, Wild Pastures wins our vote, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not fans of Butcher Box.
Here’s how they compared head-to-head in every category.
Wild Pastures
Pros
- High-quality meat from domestic farms
- All meat is regenerative sourced, whole use, and zero waste
- Choose your own selections
- Reasonably priced
- Free shipping with a subscription
Cons
- There is less variety than in Butcher Box
- Adding certain items to your box costs more
Butcher Box
Pros
- Grass-finished and grass-fed beef
- Sustainable practices
- Great variety
- Great for people who like curated boxes
- Better seafood options
Cons
- Limited box options
- Custom boxes cost more
- Slightly more expensive than Wild Pastures
- Not 100% domestic
Subscription Boxes
When choosing a meat delivery service, it’s important that the subscription options fit your lifestyle and needs. You need to take into consideration details like family size, freezer space, how many times per week you typically include meat in your meals, and what types of high-quality meat you prefer. Do you prefer a box that’s curated for you, or do you prefer a custom box that you fill with your own selections?
Wild Pastures offers fully customizable boxes, but you start by choosing if you want a box that contains beef & chicken, chicken & pork, or pork & beef. There’s also an option to order a box that contains all three.
The next step is to choose if you want a box with about 15 lbs, which is good for one to three people, or if you want to step up to the 25 lb box, which is a good choice if you have four or more meat eaters in your home.
One detail that we especially like about Wild Pastures is that you don’t need to sign up for recurring shipments. It’s a little more budget-friendly to subscribe, but you’re allowed to order a one-time box, which is great if you just want to try them out or don’t eat a lot of meat and don’t want to commit to regular deliveries.
If you do decide to subscribe to Wild Pastures, you can choose if you want meat delivered every four weeks, six weeks, two months, or three months.
Butcher Box offers four options for their subscription options, including customizable boxes if you prefer a curated box with a selection of the best cuts available.
The curated boxes offer the choice of beef & chicken, beef & pork, or beef, chicken & pork. If you want seafood included in your box, your only option is to choose one of the custom boxes or add it on for an additional charge.
Once you choose the type of box you want, the next step is to choose the size. The custom boxes are available in 9-14 lbs or 18-26lbs. For all other options, the classic box size is 8-11 lbs, and the larger box is 16-22 lbs. Keep in mind that all weights are approximate, and it really depends on what your boxes are filled with.
Once you’ve got the type of subscription box and the size narrowed down, then you choose how often you want it delivered. Butcher Box offers the option of every four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks.
Subscription Boxes Winner
It was difficult to pick a winner for this category since both meat delivery services offer good subscription options. One of the key differences, and why we choose Wild Pastures, is that all of their boxes are customizable, and we love the fact that we can order a single box instead of subscribing right from the start. We also like the variety of delivery options, from every four weeks to every three months.
Variety
Wild Pastures
Butcher Box
Variety is one of several key reasons we decided to try out a few of the top meat delivery options. Even with decent options locally, it seems like it’s the same cuts on repeat, and we can’t always get the quality or ethics that we’re looking for.
We found the selection from Wild Pastures to be high quality but rather basic. This isn’t the right service for you if you’re looking for a huge variety, but they offer the full spectrum of the most popular meat choices.
On the Wild Pastures menu, you’ll find options like ground beef and ground pork, along with several choices for ground sausage. There are also pork steaks, weighing a hefty half-pound each. There’s also pre-seasoned taco meat, which is a tasty and easy way to make Taco Tuesdays a reality in your house. Oh, and the sugar-free bacon – we can’t forget the bacon!
For chicken, choices included whole chickens, chicken breast, chicken thighs, chicken wings, and drumsticks. Beef selections include NY strip, sirloin, ribeye, filet mignon, stew meat, and kabobs.
Currently, there aren’t many seafood options available from Wild Pastures.
Butcher Box’s menu is a bit more diverse. For beef, the selections include:
Premium ground beef
Ground sirloin
Sirloin tips
Tri-tip
Flat iron steak
Chuck roast
Top sirloin steak
Flank steak
Ribeye steak
NY strip
Beef brisket
Sirloin cap
Pre-portioned burgers
All of the beef offered by Butcher Box is 100% grass-fed beef.
For chicken, you get all the basics with Butcher Box, including whole chicken, chicken breast, chicken tenders, thighs, drumsticks, and ground chicken. Humanely raised pork options include ground pork, ground Italian sausage, boneless pork chops, pork tenderloin, ribs, center-cut pork roast, pork butt roast, and bacon.
While the seafood offering from Butcher Box isn’t huge, they at least offer something. This includes salmon, salmon burgers, scallops, cod, and shrimp.
Variety Winner
Overall, Butcher Box offers a greater variety of grass-fed and finished beef, pasture-raised chicken, humanely-raised pork, and wild-caught seafood. We wish the custom box didn’t cost more than the curated box so we could have access to all the selections without an increase in price, but you do get a few more pounds with the customized boxes.
Sourcing & Quality
Wild Pastures
Butcher Box
One detail about Wild Pastures that caught our eye, aside from the high-quality meat they offer, is their process of sourcing meat, combined with their commitment to eco-sustainability.
Wild Pastures sources all their meat from local family farmers in the United States. These aren’t factory farms but the smaller farms that make up much of the backbone of this country. All of the farmers Wild Pastures works with use regenerative farming practices, both to support healthy animals and a healthier ecosystem.
Wild Pastures is committed to standards such as 100% grass-fed beef and grass-finished beef, pasture raised meats, humanely raised pork products, where the pigs spend their entire lives roaming and grazing as they please, sustainably raised free-range organic chicken, and wild-caught seafood from the world’s most sustainable salmon run. Working only with local family farms makes all of this possible – without costing you an arm and a leg.
Wild Pasture meat is also sourced with a zero-waste policy, using the entire animal, and farmers participate in rotational grazing to better support the land.
ButcherBox meat is also sustainably sourced with an emphasis on ethical farming practices. Their pasture-raised meat is humanely raised. With 100% grass-fed beef and grass-finished beef, the meat quality is testimony to the farming practices.
ButcherBox offers organic, free-range chicken, and they’re Global Animal Partnership certified. These standards follow through to everything you get from ButcherBox, from pork and bison to their wild-caught seafood.
While both companies have high standards, one of the key differences between the two is that Wild Pastures is locally sourced from domestic farms in the United States, while ButcherBox does source a good portion of its meat from Australia.
Sourcing & Quality Winner
Wild Pastures & ButcherBox both have respectable policies when it comes to sourcing their meats, and they’re both known for great quality. Wild Pastures wins our vote in the category because we appreciate that their meats are locally sourced from family-run local farms that are committed to regenerative practices and pasture raised meats.
We also really like their zero waste policy and how Wild Pastures is committed to using the entire animal. In addition to ethically sourced meat, Wild Pastures also uses very eco-friendly packaging.
Pricing
Wild Pastures
CURATED BOXES | WEIGHT | PRICE PER MONTH |
Customizable Box | 15 lbs | $174 |
Customizable Box | 25 lbs | $274 |
Beef & Pork Box | 15 lbs | $186 |
Beef & Pork Box | 25 lbs | $286 |
Butcher Box
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 |
For us, pricing is a very important consideration when choosing any type of food delivery. Of course, the cost is going to be higher than what we’d normally pay at the grocery store, but in all honestly, so many meat service companies are priced at a point that makes them inaccessible to many people. In our opinion, both Butcher Box and Wild Pastures do a good job of offering high-quality, sustainably sourced meat at reasonable prices.
With Wild Pastures, you’re going to pay $174 for approximately 15lbs of meat or $274 for about 25lbs of meat. If you are good with signing up for a subscription, you can save anywhere from 10%-25% off those prices, depending on what type of promotion they’re currently running.
Even at full cost, Wild Pastures averages out to about $11 per pound. You might not think that’s great for something like ground beef, but when you consider the other cuts you can get, like grass-fed steaks such as filet mignon and ribeyes, it seems really reasonable – especially for the quality. Plus, if you subscribe, you also get free shipping for life.
Wild Pastures does charge extra for some items if you choose to add them to your box. For example, you can add two ribeyes to your box for no extra charge, but if you wanted four instead, there would be an additional charge for that.
Butcher Box prices start at $146 for the classic box, which is 8-11 lbs (approximately), and $269 for the larger box, that’s 16- 22 lbs. The curated boxes have a little more heft to them, but the price is also a bit more.
With the curated selections, you’re going to spend an average of $11-$14 per pound. In the past, we’ve ordered meat from other food delivery services, like Thrive Market, and found that Butcher Box was comparable, if not a little better, in both quality and pricing.
Pricing Winner
The overall cost of Wild Pastures is lower, even though you do have to be careful when selecting what goes into your box and keep an eye out for upcharges. With locally sourced meat and their zero waste policy, Wild Pastures is able to keep their costs as close to wholesale prices as possible.
Customer Service
Wild Pastures
Butcher Box
We take a close look at a company’s customer service before subscribing. We don’t like the idea of spending our hard-earned money on a company with less-than-stellar customer service standards, and we can only assume you feel the same.
Starting with Wild Pastures, they make it easy to pause your subscription or skip a delivery. Canceling isn’t a huge deal, either. However, it’s possible to avoid all of that by just ordering a box whenever you want one without worrying about recurring shipments.
In our experience, Wild Pastures has been easy to work with, and we haven’t had a problem. They also have great reviews, at least on their own site. Finding a Wild Pastures review on trusted review sites like TrustPilot or Google proved to be a challenge.
Butcher Box has been around longer, which means they’ve had more of a chance to build up a reputation – both good and bad. With Butcher Box, you can also cancel or update your delivery preference without much issue.
In looking at reviews, some customers were less than pleased with how Butcher Box handled issues like dry ice being gone by the time the box arrived or the freezer bag the meat was in being compromised. In all fairness, we haven’t experienced any of these issues ourselves.
Customer Service Winner
This was a tough call. Wild Pastures is newer than Butcher Box, which works both for and against them. However, while Butcher Box is one of the most popular meat delivery options, Wild Pastures has impressed us with its customer service standards.
FAQs
Where does Wild Pastures meat come from?
Wild Pastures offers pasture raised meats from local, sustainable, and regenerative farms in the United States.
Is Butcher Box truly grass-fed?
Butcher Box is committed to offering 100% grass-fed beef that’s also grass-finished.
Is pasture-raised beef better?
Pasture-raised meat generally tastes better when compared to similar types of meat from factory farms. However, there’s more that goes into it, and you can’t just assume that because a company says they have pasture-raised meat, it’s also the highest quality meat. If you’re buying meat online, make sure that the company you choose is known for quality and sustainability.
Is ButcherBox beef pasture raised?
ButcherBox beef is pasture-raised and sourced from farmers and ranchers with sustainable and ethical practices.
Winner
Wild Pastures
What’s our final verdict in the battle of Wild Pastures vs. Butcher Box? Both companies are great, and you can’t go wrong with trying either. However, there’s so much about Wild Pastures that we appreciate, from their commitment to working with regenerative farms and zero waste policy to the fact that they work with domestic family farms.
Still, there are reasons you might prefer Butcher Box. Here are a few points to consider.
Choose Wild Pastures if you:
- Are you looking for a sustainable, domestically sourced meat delivery service
- Would prefer to choose what goes into your box rather than having a curated box sent to you
- Like the idea of not needing a subscription
- Are looking for a more budget-friendly meat option
- Like more flexibility in when you have meat delivered
Choose Butcher Box if you:
- Love 100% grass-fed beef
- Want great variety
- Like the idea of curated boxes
- Prefer that your meats are flash frozen before they reach you
Thank you great and easy reading for determining which one to go with!!!
Nice summary of the major considerations for using a meat delivery service.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
I believe there’s a correction needed: Wild Pastures claims to be fully grass fed and the chicken and pork are pasture raised, whereas butcher box chicken is “cage-free” which I put in quotations because we know that’s bs.
I have been using butcher box for years but I’m considering moving to Wild Pastures due to their commitment to truly pasture raised chicken and pork and local farmers. They are also cheaper.
If butcher box began buying local, it would help force more farmers to commit to sustainable practices. We need our companies to be aligned to our values as consumers.