Crowd Cow

Crowd Cow is an American online meat and seafood delivery marketplace based in Seattle that connects ranchers, farms and fisheries with consumers. The company began by shipping beef and later broadened its assortment to include chicken, pork, lamb and seafood. Products are sold with information about the producing farm or fishery, and producer names are printed on product labels. The catalog spans grass-fed and pasture-raised beef, American, Australian and Japanese A5 Wagyu, poultry, pork, wild-caught and farmed seafood, game and specialty items, and prepared sides, sourced from named suppliers such as Little Belt Cattle Co. (Montana), Mishima Reserve, Kagoshima Farms and Hokkaido Wagyu (Japan), Margaret River and Stone Axe Wagyu (Australia), Frigorifico Pando (Uruguay), Sena Sea (Alaska), Joyce Farms and Mary's Heirloom Chicken.

Orders are shipped fully frozen in insulated boxes with dry ice, with individual cuts vacuum-sealed; the company offers standard (1-3 day) and priority shipping and states that all meat is USDA inspected. Crowd Cow positions its sourcing around animal welfare, environmental sustainability and traceability, ships products frozen to reduce waste, and says it uses recyclable packaging and compostable insulation. Alongside one-off purchases, it sells subscription boxes, curated bundles and gift boxes, and operates a corporate gifting program with customizable and branded bundles.

The company markets its meat as following sustainable agriculture principles and ethical treatment of farm animals, and sources from ranchers that do not use hormones or superfluous antibiotics.

Founding story

Crowd Cow was founded in Seattle in mid-2015 by Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry, who had met in the 2000s at the mobile startup Avogadro, later acquired by Openwave. Heitzeberg had founded Snapvine and worked at Madrona Venture Labs; Lowry co-founded the restaurant recommendation service Urbanspoon, and the two had previously run Hack Things together and crowdfunded the Poppy stereo-camera product on Kickstarter around 2013. The idea came from a friend who annually bought a whole cow from a Western Washington farm; Lowry, whose household otherwise did not eat meat, reasoned that buying a whole animal would be feasible if roughly 50 people shared it. After cold-calling farms, visiting farmers' markets and butchers, they secured agreements with two farms, emailed 100 friends and ran a test campaign to sell shares of a roughly 550-pound animal bought from a small farm near Seattle. The first animal sold out in about a day in mid-June 2015 to buyers in Washington, Chicago, New York and Florida. The company name reflects this crowdfunding of meat from individual cows.

Business model

Crowd Cow operates a direct-to-consumer online marketplace, buying from independent farms, ranches and fisheries and selling curated cuts, bundles and boxes directly to households across the contiguous U.S., with a parallel corporate gifting channel handled by a concierge team.

Revenue comes from online sales of individual cuts, curated bundles and gift boxes at per-item prices, from recurring subscription boxes with subscribable products, and from corporate gifting bundles.

Traction

Crowd Cow generated $1 million in sales within its first several months and had reached that mark by January 2016; it shipped roughly 100 cattle by January 2017 and about 300 by August 2017, and received several thousand orders a month in 2017 from customers typically reordering every two months. Headcount grew from two founders in January 2016 to 22 in August 2017 and 90 in 2020. Its gifting site cites more than 100,000 customers.

Latest developments

The consumer site is running seasonal grilling promotions and a new-customer offer combining a free three-protein welcome box with a free premium protein in each subscription box, described as up to $1,560 per year in value, alongside new producer arrivals and expanded Wagyu and seafood assortments.