You Can Order Wagyu Beef Right to Your Door With These Meat Subscription Boxes

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We’re in the eating season. Between tailgates, family gatherings, and holiday parties, there’s a lot of food prep happening, whether its using your favorite cast-iron or loading up the smoker. Grocery stores can get swamped on weekends or have picked-over selections, but getting meat ready to grill is as easy as online shopping. Meat subscription boxes are monthly (or a-la-carte) boxes filled with a selection of high-quality meat you’d normally have to go to a couple of butcher shops to get—all delivered right to your door.

While hardly new, meat delivery services have expanded options of products, buying options, and shipping methods to deliver premium cuts of beef to avid meat eaters. You can buy and try as you please, or stock up on your favorites each month with a custom subscription.

They also make for a unique gift when you don’t know what to get that person who mostly just wants to drink a beer and tend to their grilling grate. We tried out a bunch of these boxes ourselves to vet the quality and taste of the meat, as well as the general experience, from shipping and packaging to customer service.

The Best Meat Subscription Boxes

• Best Subscription: ButcherBox Favorites

• Best Dry Aged: Best of Porter Road Box

• Best Variety: Gift Chop Box

• Best Game Day Box: Wagyu BBQ Bundle
  

• Best Splurge: Snake River Farms The Wagyu Way
  

What to Consider

Subscription Options

Meat delivery services are often thought to be subscription-only but that isn’t the case. The brands we recommend offer many buying options including one-time purchases of single products or gift boxes, or subscription based options where they automatically bill you and send your order at whatever frequency you choose.

Some brands allow you to completely customize your order, while others have a curated box (think of it as a fixed menu) for subscriptions. Almost all of them have one-time purchase gift boxes that give a general sampling of what that company does best and what their customers enjoy most. This is your best bet if you want to sample and don’t want to commit to any recurring charge, or if you’re buying this as a gift.

It takes some poking around to understand what is and isn’t available as a recurring subscription. Brands differ on what you can purchase once and what you can get as a subscription while others offer no subscriptions or one-time single purchase option altogether. We’ve detailed exactly what each company offers below to help you decide.

Shipping

Meat is a perishable, so you may be hesitant to order a box of it in the mail. However, the brands we recommend take into account flash freezing, in-transit storage, and shipping times for their products to ensure they’re as fresh as possible when they get to you.

Most products arrive frozen and vacuum sealed surrounded by insulation to ensure the best taste. Factor in a thaw time if you’re planning to cook for a special occasion and never consume a product that feels warm to the touch when it arrives. Reputable services know that spoiled raw meat is a risk and generally offer to replace or refund orders that arrive damaged, but be sure to check the policy before you splurge on a Wagyu cut.

Some brands, like our Best Dry Aged pick, ship products unfrozen but insulated to stay at an ideal temperature while in transit. Styrofoam and ice packs are environmental nightmares, which is why we only recommend meat delivery companies that use dry ice, recyclable or biodegradable insulation, or recyclable packing materials.

How We Selected

Where I grew up in Houston, barbecue, Tex-Mex, and burgers reign supreme and grocery stores around town have meat and poultry sections bigger than the grocery store I now frequent in Brooklyn. I knew meat delivery services existed but never thought I needed them until I overpaid for pork chops that were mostly fat—I had a sad, chewy dinner during one of my first weeks here, and that’s when I started researching different meat subscription boxes.

I was pleasantly surprised at not only the variety and quality, but the humane and sustainable efforts some are making. Over the last several months, I’ve ordered a bunch of different meat boxes from a bunch of different companies and pooled the ones that have a wide variety, quality product, and seamless ordering and shipping. Whether you’re wanting to try something new, ship a turkey to your destination ahead of holiday travels, buy a unique gift, or stock up the freezer, there’s a meat subscription box for you.

Favorites Meat Subscription Box

Butcher Box is one of the best known brands for meat delivery and emphasizes pasture-raised, grass-fed beef. It originally sourced its beef exclusively from Australia because it’s highly regulated, but the brand now sources about 20 percent of its meat from its own domestic program.

Beyond beef, it also has a wide variety of pork and chicken sourced from the U.S. and Canada, as well as delicious wild-caught seafood. The brand’s Favorites Box gives you an idea of the best it has to offer with organic chicken, pork, and sausage to round out the variety.

The standouts to me were the pork chops and ground beef. The pork chops have just a sliver of fat on them for taste and the 85/15 ground beef was a step up from the limited selection of my local grocery store.

There are plenty of gift boxes to choose from for specific taste and if you decide you want to keep the meat train rolling, subscriptions are available. You can choose a custom or curated order in two sizes and decide if you want them every month or every other month. You can pause or cancel anytime without fees.

Best of Porter Road Meat Subscription Box

Porter Road offers a variety of prime, dry-aged beef as well as less common choices like Denver steak and beef cheeks. Dry-aged beef goes through a process of temperature-controlled aging before being trimmed and cut. It develops flavor and becomes more tender so when it’s cooked you get that “melt in your mouth” experience.

The filet mignon was excellent seared in a cast iron and finished off in the oven—tender with lots of flavor. The cuts were also a bit larger than the usual 5- or 6-ounce ones you find at the store. A similar cooking method yielded tasty results with the pork tenderloin as well for a quick week-night dinner.

You can shop curated boxes for a one-time purchase or a subscription and the price is the same either way. Even if you can cancel anytime, it’s nice to side-step the potential forgotten billing cycles and try different boxes when you want.

You can also purchase single products from this brand, which is a great option for holiday feasts or for those who want to test drive smoking a good brisket just once. Be warned: If it comes out bad, it’s not the quality of meat in question here.

Meat Gift Box

Chop Box has an expanded variety past the usual fare of other meat delivery services with options like duck, lamb, and veal. There’s a variety of USDA-Prime, grass-fed, and Wagyu beef options that are vegetarian-fed and have no added hormones. The brand’s seafood is wild-caught and Chop Box prioritizes sustainability and humane practices when sourcing all of its products.

You can choose curated boxes as one-off purchases, but only custom boxes are available for a subscription. This is helpful if you want to stock up on a single freezer staple like ground beef and boneless chicken without having unwanted add-ons in your monthly delivery. However, the minimum purchase is $99 with shipping costs between $10 and $30, so smaller households may find this to be too much meat at once.

There’s a limited amount of single products available on the brand’s gifts page if you’re considering something to stock up on but aren’t quite sure.

Wagyu BBQ Bundle Meat Delivery Service

K.C. Cattle Company is a veteran-founded brand with a huge selection of Wagyu beef as well as a limited selection of pork and chicken. There’s no minimum requirement for orders and you can shop curated boxes or choose a subscription option from its butcher shop.

While K.C. Cattle offers all of the prime cuts of steak, its standout products are simple, tailgate favorites. The bratwursts are stuffed with cheese and bacon that melts when you cook them and the peppered beef made a couple days worth of amazing sandwiches. I also got the Wagyu chorizo which was seasoned almost to the point of spicy—in the best way—and seemed to have a lower fat content than what my grocery store offers (that one tends to be too greasy for me).

There’s a $50 minimum for orders and shipping is reasonable at $10. The company ships on Monday or Tuesday depending on your location to ensure your order arrives by the weekend.

The Wagyu Way

Snake River Farms has a range of dry-aged cuts as well as a huge selection of American Wagyu beef. Simply put, Wagyu beef are cattle bred in Japan, known for excellent marbling (the little white lines of muscle you see in steak). When cooked, those lines of muscle break down and add flavor and tenderness to the meat.

American Wagyu is made from a Japanese Wagyu cow bred with Angus cattle for a balance of texture and flavor. The brand uses recyclable packaging materials and biodegradable insulation and its partner ranch uses rotational grazing methods for sustainability purposes.

You can pick your favorite cuts of beef, pork, or seafood, or choose a curated gift box. There is a minimum order of $49 though it’s an easy minimum to reach. Shipping starts at $10.

Exotic Jerky Bouquet

More bouquet than box, but who wouldn’t want this much jerky? Carnivore Club is a subscription snack box that rotates its offering every month with a regional theme of charcuterie, condiments, and other add-ons.

The Jerky Bouquet has five sticks each of four different types of jerky: elk, buffalo, mild venison, and hot venison. Jerky fanatics can also join the brand’s Jerky Club for a monthly rotating selection similar to their snack boxes.

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