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In an effort to socially distance, are you also forgoing regular trips to your favorite butcher? Well, there's a meat delivery service for that. There are a variety of online butchers that will deliver chicken, pork, lamb, and more to your front door—and in the current climate, supporting sustainable farmers and butchers while also limiting your exposure seems like a wise plan. Below are our favorite meat delivery services out of all the online butchers we tested.
Back in early 2019, our Commerce Editor Emily Johnson ordered a whole chicken and a strip steak from each of the online butchers below. Note that all of the butchers offer more (turkey! chicken livers! sausage!) but she wanted to try standard cuts of meat that home cooks regularly cook with. The Epicurious editors then took home the goods (instead of leaving Emily to cook a dozen chickens herself) and reported back with their findings. Those notes on each meat delivery service are below, along with additional insights we've gleaned from using some of these services again and again over the last year and a half—it turns out mail order meat can be very convenient for busy home cooks!
Comparing the prices of these services is a little tricky—it's just not apples to apples. Each service has different order minimums to reach free shipping, different inventory, and different standards of animal care. We've given you price of a whole chicken for each service, with one exception where a whole chicken isn't available. However, the cheapest chicken isn't necessarily the best tasting or most humanely raised, nor does it always represent the overall affordability of the service.
Crowd Cow
Crowd Cow started because the founder had a desire to buy meat from a local farmer—somewhere close enough by that he could get a good sense of the farming practices and care that went into each cut of chicken, lamb, or steak. When our editors first tested Crowd Cow in 2019, the site was only working with a few domestic farms and the focus was very much on beef, with little else available. The strip steak our editor tested was a well marbled cut from a 100-percent grass-fed cow, and the chicken was not the plumpest bird but still yielded a crispy-skinned, relatively juicy bird.
Our Associate Commerce Editor Lauren Joseph tested Crowd Cow again this month, and was pleasantly surprised by how much the offerings had expanded. The site offers custom boxes of a variety of cuts, including wild caught fish, pasture-raised chicken, and heritage thick cut pork chops. Our editor tried a flavorful batch of chicken thighs, and a pack of pleasantly mild and fresh Wild Norwegian Atlantic Salmon filets. The site is frequently sold out, like most online butcher shops right now given the coronavirus pandemic. However, a rep from Crowd Cow tells us that signing up for re-stocking notices on each filet of fish, chicken thigh, or lamb shoulder you would like gives you the best chance of being first to refill your cart.
Porter Road
We tested Porter Road this spring, and couldn't find a single thing to complain about. Each cut was tender, juicy, and well wrapped (key to prevent to dreaded meat leakage issue). When our former Deputy Editor Anya Hoffman tested this steak (along with her highly discerning, steak-loving eight-year-old daughter) they found the beef to be tender and flavorful. Porter Road's strip steak is dry-aged for 14 days, which gives it a deep, savory flavor and a juicy, tender texture. Associate Editor Joe Sevier made a low-fuss crispy roast chicken using a whole chicken from Porter Road. He thought the thighs were great—with flavorful, juicy fat deposits—but the breast was a little dry and the chicken was small. Overall though, he found the chicken to be high-quality.
Unlike some of the online butchers that source from one farm, Porter Road works with a variety of small producers around Kentucky and Tennessee, processes their meat at a centralized location in Kentucky, and butchers it in their acclaimed shop in Nashville. The beef is pasture-raised and fed non-GMO feed. Yes, it's not totally grass-fed, but it did have some of the best marbling and flavor of all the steaks we tested.
It's worth noting that their website is also one of the easiest to maneuver—and that while their usual subscription boxes are on hold due to high demand during the coronavirus pandemic, their à la carte options are plenty varied. A rep from Porter Road tells us that the site is restocked between 11am–2 pm EST each weekday, so if you're finding yourself frustrated by out of stock signs, check back around then daily.
Fossil Farms
When our editors first tested out Fossil Farms, they were frustrated by the lack of meat sourcing info and the fact that most things had to be ordered in huge quantities. Since 2019, Fossil Farms has dramatically improved upon their site: Sourcing is clear and smaller cuts of meat are available. The site has plenty of wild game (kangaroo, antelope, and alligator, for example) but there is also chicken, lamb, and duck available. While the prices are lower than most other services we tried, we did find that the chicken wasn't particularly impressively flavored and that the steak arrived in a leaky, squished packaged.
Snake River Farms
Snake River Farms only offers pork and beef, but its New York Strip was tender, flavorful, and well-marbled. Emily used it to make this steak Diane recipe and it yielded tender, flavorful results. The steak is wet, rather than dry-aged, meaning it's sealed with its own juices and left to age in a refrigerator. The website, however, lacks detailed information on the sourcing and treatment of the beef.
Greensbury
Greensbury offers organic meat and wild seafood delivery. The steaks are wet-aged for 21 days, grass-fed, pasture-raised, and sourced from a variety of farms around the country. Before he went largely pescatarian, Epi Digital Director David Tamarkin tried the chicken, which comes from a family farm in the Shenandoah Valley and is fed an all-vegetarian diet free of hormones, antibiotics, and animal byproduct. The meat arrived frozen (many of the others we tried were packed in dry ice), and even after several days in the refrigerator to thaw, it was still frozen. Needless to say, it took a long time to cook. Still, the end result, he assures me, was a delicious roast chicken.
White Oak Pastures
When Emily tried a White Oak Pastures steak, she found it to be extremely well-marbled, large, and, frankly, beautiful, right out of the package. Even though she didn't age it in the refrigerator for 21 days as the website directed, it was still bursting with lots of dry-aged, umami flavor and it was super juicy and tender. White Oak Pastures is in Southwest Georgia, where they claim the climate is optimal for pasture-raised cattle. Indeed, this steak has the kind of flavor and marbling usually associated with grain-fed beef.
Joe—already a longtime fan of White Oak Pastures—tried the chicken with this recipe and found it tender, juicy, and generally perfect, if a little small. This is something the butcher owns up to: "[Our chickens] are lean, but they are full of flavor." They recommend more moisture and a shorter cooking time as the best way to handle lean animals.
Grass Roots Farmer's Coop
Grass Roots Farmer's Coop is all about pasture raised, no GMO, no hormone, and no antibiotic farming practices. The chicken we tested was air-chilled and free-range, and yielded a tender, juicy roast chicken dinner. The grass-fed strip steak from Grass Roots Farmer's Coop was tender and flavorful. It was slightly less marbled and smaller than its White Oak Farms counterpart, weighing about 8 ounces, but still delicious when seasoned with salt and pepper and seared simply in a cast-iron skillet with butter. The steaks are sourced from small family farms, dry-aged, and additive-free.
