Meatheads!

Don't get me wrong. I eat beef. But most of the beef I eat is consumed outside of the home. 

I'll order the hamburger. And I'll enjoy it. I'll order the steak. And I'll enjoy it. 

But mostly, I'm just not all that much of a meathead. Unless my meat-and-potatoes brother Rich is coming to dinner, I'm not apt to cook anything beefy. Chicken, fish, shrimp, scallops. Yes, indeed! Beef, ah, no.

So I wouldn't be in the market to have ButcherBox deliver me up a box o' beef. They do offer other "mains:" chicken, pork, seafood. But I'm just not a candidate for a monthly subscription to meat. (I am not, but could easily be, an in-house vegetarian. Unless I'm cooking for my bro.) And to me, subscriptions are for magazines, not meats.

Still, ButcherBox is a local company with a pretty good story to tell.

For one thing, the company is a Kickstarter success story. In its eight years, it's gone from zero revenue to well over $500M. And it's done so without requiring any infusion of funds from VCs. Not to mention that they've been "consistently profitable" pretty much since they were Kickstarted in 2015.

But all is not 100% humanely grass-fed golden at ButcherBox.

In fact, 2023 will be the first year that their revenues haven't increased. And in November they laid off 15 people. 

The company says that the layoffs aren't, despite a no-growth  year, due to poor financials. The company is still profitable. Instead, the layoffs were motivated by a desire to operate more efficiently. Pre-layoffs, the company had some managers who "were only managing a single employee." (Which having been-there, done-that, is not entirely as crazy as it sounds.)

While 2023 hasn't been death-knell dire, ButcherBox didn't experience the success they were used to. 

From the jump:

...ButcherBox had incredible timing. First, it tapped into the paleo and CrossFit trends, which advocated a meat-heavy diet. Then COVID came, pushing many consumers to get groceries delivered, rather than going to the store. (At one point in 2020, demand was so intense that ButcherBox had to temporarily stop accepting new customers.) (Source: Boston Globe)

So now they're coping with the new reality of people eating out more - hey, it's where I get my steak - and also, given inflation, more given to scrutiny of where their grocery spending is going. Plus, there's more (inevitable) competition.

So ButcherBox is thinking a tiny bit outside the box, and they're now selling dog treats. Next year, they're going to bring out a dog kibble product.

This makes marketing sense, in that they'll be able to upsell (or is it sidesell?) their customers who have dogs. If I'm recalling my Marketing 101 correctly, it takes a lot less money to sell something to an existing customer than it does to acquire a new customer from scratch. 

But dog kibble, not a box of meat? After all, dogs - those greedy little carnivores - love meat, so why not give them what they want. Which in a blind taste test is not likely to be kibble. 

The company chose to launch a dry food for dogs rather than a frozen food, because “we didn’t want to compete against ourselves” for space in the freezer, Salguero said.

Aha! These guys are good!

And I wish them continued success.

After all, one of these days I might get me a dog, and if someone (such as the pooch itself) could convince me to feed it kibble...

Well, you never know...