MeatWorks had a gifting channel that was working. They just didn't know who their gifting buyer actually was, or what it would take to reach them at scale. Here's what happened when they found out.
Overview
MeatWorks is a premium DTC steak subscription brand. They had a great product, a loyal customer base, and a gifting channel they knew had potential. What they didn't have was a clear picture of who their gifting buyer actually was, or what it would take to reach them at scale.
When Schaefer applied its Why People Buy Pyramid™ specifically to the gifting segment, the answer was surprising. And when MeatWorks rebuilt its strategy around it, with Zest providing the platform infrastructure to deliver on it, gift orders grew 81%, and gift revenue grew 323% year-over-year. Without increasing ad spend.
The Challenge
MeatWorks came to Schaefer with a familiar problem: growth had stalled. Their DTC subscription business was performing well, but the gifting channel was underperforming relative to the product's value. Premium USDA Prime steak, delivered to your door. It's an obvious gift. But the numbers weren't reflecting that.
The issue wasn't the product. It wasn't even the marketing budget. It was that MeatWorks, like most food and beverage brands, was targeting the buyer they assumed was buying. Not the buyer who actually was.
Our Approach
Schaefer ran a four-phase engagement designed to surface the real buyer and build a strategy around them.
MeatWorks' funnel, ad accounts, website, and analytics were reviewed in full. The messaging wasn't clearly communicating value, and the path to purchase had drop-off zones bleeding conversion.
Current and potential customers were surveyed and interviewed to understand what actually motivated them to buy, specifically who was buying as a gift, for whom, and why. This is where the real discovery happened.
With the research in hand, the gifting strategy was rebuilt around real buyer psychology. Messaging, targeting, channels, and positioning were all redefined to match what the right buyer needed to hear.
Campaigns launched against the new strategy and were optimized from live performance data. The results validated the approach quickly and kept compounding.
The Discovery
MeatWorks was targeting 30–45-year-old suburban dads. Grillmasters with high incomes and large households. It made intuitive sense. Premium steak, backyard grilling, the aspirational image. The brand had built its entire positioning around this person.
The research told a different story.
The most valuable gifting customer wasn't a younger dad buying for himself or his household. It was a retiree, typically 65 and older, often living alone or with a spouse, cooking for one or two people and spending their discretionary income on a small luxury they genuinely look forward to.
These buyers weren't purchasing to perform or impress. They were buying to treat themselves and the people they loved. The motivation was warmth, ritual, and quality of life.
This segment had been invisible in MeatWorks' targeting because the brand was measuring the wrong signals. They were filtering for age, income, and household size, while the buyers who converted best, spent the most, and gifted most consistently were showing up anyway. Underserved, under-messaged, and largely missed.
When the targeting, creative, and messaging were rebuilt around this segment, everything changed.
The Platform That Made It Possible
Knowing who the gifting buyer was solved half the problem. The other half was infrastructure. Before working with Zest, MeatWorks faced a challenge that stops most F&B brands before they ever scale a gifting channel: the technology wasn't there. The alternative was building it from scratch with custom code, a months-long project, a significant engineering investment, and a timeline that doesn't survive contact with a holiday window.
Zest solved it in weeks. Working together, Schaefer and Zest architected a solution around two distinct gifting channels. Zest unlocked features MeatWorks hadn't been able to find anywhere else. We had been looking for gifting solutions for corporate and consumer gifts for nearly six months. Downloading Shopify apps, met with sales agents, and watched demos. Then we met the team at Zest and the platform made sense, had features everyone else was missing, and a team we could actually talk strategy with. MeatWorks went live in early October, ahead of the peak holiday window, and the channel performed immediately.
Schaefer brought the buyer insight. Zest brought the infrastructure. The combination is what the partnership is built to replicate.
The Results
The gap between the two numbers below is the most important part of this story. Revenue growing at nearly four times the rate of order volume isn't a volume story. It's a buyer quality story. When you reach the right gifting customer with the right message, they spend more per order and return more often.
The lift in revenue outpaced the lift in orders by nearly 4x. That gap is what happens when you find buyers with higher intent and spend, not just more buyers. It's the difference between reaching the person who was vaguely interested and reaching the person who was genuinely motivated. Research is what tells you who that person is.
Why this buyer gifts. The gifting behavior wasn't separate from the self-purchase behavior. It was an extension of it. These buyers had already made MeatWorks part of their own routine — a small, reliable luxury they looked forward to. When they wanted to give something meaningful, they reached for the thing they already trusted. They weren't shopping a gifting category. They were sharing something they'd personally vetted.
The Bigger Picture
Most food and beverage brands approach gifting the same way MeatWorks started: with a product that would make a great gift, a channel that gets some seasonal volume, and an assumption about who the gifting buyer is. The assumption is almost always based on who they think should be buying. Not who actually is.
The MeatWorks story is a proof of concept for what happens when you replace that assumption with real data. The product doesn't change. The ad spend doesn't have to increase. What changes is the precision: who you're talking to, what you're saying, where you're putting the message, and whether the platform can actually deliver the experience the buyer expects.
That precision is what turns a gifting channel from a secondary revenue line into a meaningful, scalable business within a business. And it's replicable for any F&B brand with the right product and the willingness to invest in the infrastructure that more easily connects the right buyers with the right products.
There's a competitive dimension to this that's easy to miss as well. Gifting is one of the few moments where the buyer isn't the consumer, which means the experience has to work for two people at once. When a buyer finds a brand that makes gifting effortless and speaks to why they're actually gifting, they stop comparison shopping. The category is crowded on product. It's wide open on experience.
Schaefer × Zest: Growth Offering
The MeatWorks result isn't a one-off. It's a repeatable process for any F&B brand with the right product and the willingness to find out who's actually buying it.
Schaefer: Research + Strategy + Creative
We identify your real gifting buyer through consumer research, rebuild your strategy around what actually motivates them, and produce the creative and media plan to reach them at scale.
Campaign management available as a monthly retainer add-on.
Start with your gifting buyerZest: Platform + Infrastructure
Zest provides the gifting platform infrastructure, seamless Shopify Plus integration, consumer and corporate gifting flows, and the operational tools to deliver on the strategy at scale.
The Partners
Schaefer is a paid media and consumer insights agency that works exclusively with food and beverage brands. We identify real buyers through surveys, segmentation, and qualitative research before we scale a single dollar in paid media. Research before spend is not a tagline. It's the process.
schaefer.coMeatWorks is a custom butchery delivering steakhouse quality at home — hand cut, USA raised and expertly aged, with top 3% USDA Prime beef, local farm-raised chicken and heritage bred bacon shipped to the door.
meatworks.comZest is a first-of-its-kind SaaS platform providing ecommerce brands with modern gifting infrastructure to better serve customers and scale their DTC and B2B gifting channels.
zest.coSchaefer × Zest · MeatWorks Gifting Case Study · 2026
The research comes first. Then the strategy, the creative, and the platform that can actually deliver it.
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