by In 2021, we featured a talk from the GrazeCart founders (and owners of Seven Sons Farms) about how they learned to dramatically simplify selling custom freezer beef, pork, and lamb.
In the following years, a lot has changed in the world of direct-to-consumer meat sales.
Online sales offer independent and family farms a viable way to achieve financial independence and combat greenwashing from bigger brands like never before. Better yet, people are more comfortable buying fresh food online.
However, consumer expectations have changed, and it’s more important than ever to use the right tools to deliver the smooth and convenient customer experiences people expect.
Whether you’re just starting your journey of selling freezer beef on demand or looking to improve your processes, we can help.
Here are six tips and tools for selling freezer beef to help keep customers happy, reduce your workload, and improve sales.
Selling Frozen Meat Online: 5 Top Challenges
Before we go into all the ways to make selling frozen meat online easier and more profitable, let’s address some of the industry’s biggest challenges:
- Cost and pricing: With inflation up and wallets lighter, it’s important to find a pricing strategy that lets you charge what your products are worth without driving customers away.
- Customer experience: The more barriers that are in your customers’ way, the more likely they are to abandon your store. It’s essential to offer a modern, frictionless customer experience to find success.
- Managing perishable inventory: As order volume increases, it’s increasingly important to maintain visibility into stock levels, order statuses, different cuts, and more.
- Connecting with customers: As businesses succeed online, how can you provide modern convenience without losing the personal touch that makes you special?
- Keeping things fresh: In the local food business, it’s vital to keep things fresh (both literally and figuratively). Find ways to deliver the highest quality products and exceptional shopping experiences.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of challenges, but it helps paint a picture of what you’re up against when discussing how to sell frozen beef and meat directly to customers.
Now, let’s move on to solutions.
6 Tips & Tools For Selling Frozen Beef and Meat Online Like a Champ
For decades, ordering a quarter beef share generally looked something like this:
- The customer purchases an upfront deposit for a quarter of beef.
- They wait several weeks (or months) for the farmer to fatten the beef.
- The processor cuts the specified cuts.
- The customer pays the final hanging-weight invoice.
- The customer arranges a pickup, then drives and collects their order.
That may have been fine back in the day, but today that longer, more manual process simply won’t allow you to be competitive with a big grocery store (or the bigger names in online meat subscriptions).
Here are a few practical tips and tools to level up your online meat sales.
1. Don’t Assume Customers Know As Much As You Do
The idea of ordering frozen meat in bulk is common for a lot of people, but not as many as you might think.
Many customers looking for an easy way to buy ethically sourced meat might be intimidated by the wait times, cut selection, and other aspects of the traditional buying process.
On top of that, there are still many consumers who mistakenly see “frozen” as the antithesis of “fresh.”
Unless you make the process as simple and reassuring as buying other types of groceries online, you’ll likely lose business.
The key is to meet customers where they are, educate them, and guide them along the process to make it as simple as possible. Here are some examples of how to simplify selling frozen meat in bulk.
- Educate customers: Include a section on your homepage explaining the benefits of buying fresh, frozen meat directly from the farm instead of a grocery store. Also, provide handy references for the various cuts you offer and how they’re used.
- Offer recommended cuts: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to cut up an animal, and most consumers don’t know the difference. If they are buying in bulk, offer recommended cuts to make their decision easier.
- Create curated boxes: Similar to the previous point, having a subscription box with different, curated cuts is less intimidating for customers than having to decide on cuts themselves.
One of the biggest things we learned is that sometimes giving customers unlimited choices is bad for business. Find the balance between offering multiple options without overwhelming the average consumer.
2. Use Inventory Management Software
The easiest and most effective way to sell meat online is to have standardized cuts and bundles. However, this isn’t easy to do without a robust inventory management system.
On a small scale, spreadsheets and other systems requiring manual data entry might cut it, but they’ll be quickly overwhelmed as your business picks up steam.
That’s why an e-commerce system with built-in inventory management tools is a must. Specifically, use a system that can track inventory by weight.
Sell by weight functions allow you to weigh your current stock, separate and track different cuts in the system, and then automatically update your remaining stock levels every time you make a sale.
An accurate and up-to-date view of your inventory will make fulfillment much easier and lay the groundwork for offering a modern online shopping experience on par with bigger competitors.
Related Read: Make Meat Inventory Management a Breeze in 3 Steps
3. Automate Your Processes (Where It Makes Sense)
When considering how to sell freezer beef online, it’s important to think of what tasks you can do less of — because, at the end of the day, working smarter, not harder, is the goal.
Automation refers to various processes that can be streamlined or performed entirely by a system with minimal human input. The goal of smart automation in e-commerce and food sales is not to replace human labor but to eliminate tedious tasks like data entry so people can focus on more important work.
Imagine a customer setting up a beef subscription box where the customer always gets a certain number of each cut (meaning the final weight will be variable).
Using automation, the process would look something like this:
- A customer selects the subscription box on your website.
- They enter their credit card number, which is automatically stored on your system.
- Your inventory system is updated to remove the cuts you need from your available stock and assign them to that order.
- When your order is assigned to be packed, the final quantities are weighed then priced out automatically.
- The customer’s card is charged for the final amount, and a receipt is generated and sent to them.
Now, imagine having to handle that process manually. You’d have to call or email the customer to take a deposit, flag how many cuts need to be put aside for each order, weigh the final order, price it out manually, and so on.
In other words, the amount of work wouldn’t be worth the price of the box itself.
Automation is great for tasks like:
- Order status updates (e.g., when an order is placed, when it’s packed, when it’s shipped, etc.)
- Promotions and discounts
- Inventory updates
- Order management
- Payments and accounts receivable
Many modern e-commerce platforms have automation for many of these tasks built-in, making it easy to set up.
That said, not everything is a good fit for automation. Some tasks, such as communicating problems or delays with an order and other customer service tasks, should always be handled by a human.
4. Connect With Customers via Social Media and Newsletters
Selling your meat and fresh produce online is the best way to sell directly to customers, but you risk losing the human touch.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to find other methods to interact with customers, share your expertise, and showcase your personality.
With millions of active users, social media is an effective way to inject some personality into your brand. Use social media to:
- Highlight unique products
- Call out any seasonal promotions or deals
- Show off your staff and share your story
- Highlight your commitment to sustainable farming and ethically sourced products
- Share recipes and cooking ideas
These types of posts are great ways to advertise your brand while putting a human face on it. If you use social media, remember to create a business account and post regularly (2-3 times a week) to get the most out of it.
Newsletters are also a highly effective strategy to retain existing customers. Send out a newsletter once a week with any farm updates, new products, or recipes. You can also attach exclusive discounts and offers in every newsletter to encourage more signups.
5. Have Ample On-Site Storage and Embrace Local Shipments
Most farmers offer local pickup for meat orders, but depending on exactly how you handle that process, it can create some thorny logistical and customer service issues.
Many farmers, lacking sufficient cold storage areas, try to outsource the pickup process directly to their meat processors. Coordinating pickup times between your customers and the processors is tedious for both sides and prone to errors and frustration.
You’re also essentially asking the meat processors to provide customer service and represent your business. That approach has obvious risks.
Instead, we highly recommend investing in cold storage at your farm so that customers can pick up orders at their convenience. This is easier for customers and gives you an important chance to connect with them directly.
Even if your business isn’t prepared to ship nationwide, local shipments are the holy grail for simplifying the customer experience — and all of it starts with having that on-site storage (and an inventory system to back it up).
When you ship locally or nationally, work with reputable cold shipment companies and follow meat packing best practices to ensure every order is delivered quickly and kept fresh.
6. Use Data To Set Pricing
As inflation rises and family budgets tighten, many farmers react by lowering prices. While we understand the impulse, we’re regularly shocked by how many meat producers don’t charge what they’re worth.
Remember, you are not offering just any product; you are offering a premium, high quality product. Your prices should reflect that. However, setting the right prices is one of the hardest things a small business can do. Here’s where to start:
- Know your cost of goods sold (COGS), including the costs of all the various inputs and expenses that go into each of your popular products.
- Combine this with the sales data on your e-commerce system to understand the sales volume, inventory turnover, and profit margins for each type of meat and cut.
- Set pricing strategically based on these numbers.
An important note: don’t just raise or lower prices across the board. Set prices based on the effort and demand for individual items.
For example, you can probably afford to maintain lower prices (and slimmer profit margins) on a frequently ordered staple product like ground beef and higher prices on luxury products like a T-bone steak.
Create a Frictionless Meat Buying Experience With GrazeCart
To recap, to get the most out of your frozen meat sales, you should:
- Not overload customers with choices and simplify the order process
- Get an accurate view of your inventory using an inventory management system
- Automate tedious processes like data entry where possible
- Form connections with customers using social media and newsletters
- Invest in on-site storage and embrace local shipments
- Take a strategic approach to pricing and charge what you’re worth
If these tips and tools have anything in common, it’s that customers want simplicity. The easier it is to buy high-quality beef, the more customers you’ll attract.
Better yet, simplifying the buying process runs both ways — so you’ll do less work for more profit.
If you’re ready to dive into direct-to-consumer meat sales, GrazeCart is here to help. Built specifically for meat sellers, farm stores, and other fresh food businesses, GrazeCart makes selling meat easy with features like:
- Subscription sales support
- Sell-by-weight and weight-based inventory tracking functions
- A no-code website builder
- Delivery and pickup fulfillment tools
… and more.
Try your 14-day free trial today to understand why businesses across the country trust GrazeCart.