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The program
Primal Supply’s Butcher’s Club is a pay-as-you-go subscription meat program. Members sign up for a small ($40), medium ($66), or large ($110) box of butcher-curated meat to be picked up weekly or biweekly at a smattering of bars, restaurants, and shops across Philadelphia.
How it all began
Before launching Primal Supply’s Butcher’s Club, Heather Thomason worked at multiple meat counters, most recently heading up the butchery at Kensington Quarters in Fishtown, Philadelphia. She witnessed the inefficiency and waste inherent in a la carte meat sales: market demand for each cut is never perfectly proportional to cow anatomy (aka supply). In any business, waste is expensive. But in the business of butchery it carries environmental and ethical costs as well. Thomason envisioned a supply chain that would eliminate this waste, making quality, locally farmed meat more sustainable.
Why it works
Launched last August, the Butcher’s Club does two important things: it allows Thomason and team to sell the whole animal every time, and it makes demand very, very predictable. Months in advance, Thomason can tell her farmers how many animals she’s going to need, and they can plan and invest accordingly. They know they’ll get paid because she knows she will too. This is the magic of subscription sales.
Thomason warns, however, that subscriptions should not be wielded as a quick-fix business hack. Membership programs require happy members. And because the seller is asking something exceptional of the customer (a monetary commitment and, in many cases, a forfeiture of selection), she must also offer something exceptional in return.
At Primal Supply, the membership model is in their DNA. It’s the soul of the business. And they operate accordingly. They know their members personally and make use of this each week when they pack Butcher’s Club boxes -- allotting the most smoke-worthy cut to the guy who can’t stop talking about his Big Green Egg. They are, as Thomason put it, pretty much obsessed with customer happiness.
For the first few months, in fact, they maintained nearly perfect customer retention (Thomason remembered exactly one cancellation in that time). As the program grew, retention gave a little, but it remains very high and very sustainable. And the program continues to grow steadily with no particular effort to market it. Capacity is increasing as they slowly but surely add farmers and pick-up locations. For now, organic growth is keeping perfect pace.
The future
Growth is a double edged sword. Primal Supply is a mission-based business and, of course, Thomason wants the good that they do to multiply -- to touch more farmers and more consumers. But she didn’t hesitate to say there’s a limit to that growth. Thomason has no aspirations to see her product at the Whole Foods meat counter. The Butcher’s Club is, by design, a high touch program that runs on relationships, and Thomason is adamant that it remains that way. The Butcher’s Club is just shy of 100 members now, and she sees 300 as a likely maximum.
There’s opportunity to grow other pieces of Primal Supply’s business as well, while keeping the Butcher’s Club at the heart of the operation. Today, a big chunk of Primal Supply’s revenue comes from wholesale deals with local restaurants. They’re also happy to fulfil a la carte orders for consumers -- including non-members. After all, the club isn’t for everyone, Thomason told me. Some consumers don’t want to hand curation of their weekly dinner menu over to a third party. That’s fine by Thomason. The whole point of a membership program, she says, is to find mutual benefit in the commitment.
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