#530: Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Brand Stories | ButcherBox’s Customer-Obsessed Values Are Driving its Loyalty Program

It's a Thursday, so welcome back to our Leaders in Customer Loyalty podcast. Today is the Brand Stories Edition, as you know. It's a pleasure having you with us every Thursday. Today's conversation is going to highlight how some of the strongest customer loyalty strategies are not built around points programs, but around delivering consistent value, trust, and convenience that customers genuinely rely on.

Founded in 2015, ButcherBox began as a subscription-based meat delivery service focused on making high-quality, ethically sourced products more accessible nationwide. The brand has since evolved into a customer-first business centered on transparency, personalization, and long-term relationships. By building a subscription experience around customers' needs, ButcherBox has created customer loyalty beyond discounts and rewards through consistency and convenience. Today we're going to hear from Reba Hatcher.

She's the chief commercial officer of ButcherBox on how to strengthen customer relationships through a very effective subscription-based loyalty strategy. Welcome, Reba. It's great having you with us this Thursday. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. How about you? Doing well, thank you. For those who may not be familiar, can you give us a brief introduction to ButcherBox?

Yeah, ButcherBox is a high quality D2C brand now in retail as of January, uh, serving all lower 48 states in a number of different ways since 2015. Um we came up in the subscription model business serving that high-quality meat to consumers all over the country and decided to bring it into retail and started our loyalty program about two years ago. Okay. When you look at Butcher Box and kind of your offering, you know, what's led to the success of the brand?

I think the success of Butcher Boxes long before we started a loyalty program, being customer obsessed was one of our core values. And I think baking that in from day one helped us a lot in how we considered our customers before we considered any other factor. Uh, as most subscription brands know and all D2C brands know, that you know, the margins get tight and you start looking at ways to cut corners. But for us, it's always most important to put our customers and our product quality first.

And I think when you do that, it pays off over time. Um, and it has because we're about to hit our 11-year mark in the $600 million mark. That's awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role within the organization?

You know, what do you do on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, so I'm the chief commercial officer, which is just a lot of uh different words strung together. Um, but it essentially means I'm here to maximize the value that our customers get out of ButcherBox, and namely with the top line revenue growth from a number of different angles, including our merchandising, our digital experience, and our in-store retail. Uh and so a day-to-day looks like usually looking at our revenue numbers in the morning because everyone needs that early morning dopamine hit.

Uh, and then kind of digging into data, going through with the team, kind of how we're activating on helping our customers, what are we building for our site experience? What are we doing in our retailers? What retailers are we talking to? Um, and just making sure that we're kind of growing in all aspects and how we treat our customers and our availability.

Being a chief commercial officer, yeah, very interesting role, obviously, a very important role. You know, how did you get into marketing? How did you get into customer loyalty, or was that just given to you as a bonus for your position because you were doing so well? Yeah, we love, we always love the bonus add-ins because you're doing well.

Uh, but no, I would say all things for me start with being a data nerd. So one of my first jobs at ButcherBox was being the leader of our data analytics and really taking us through that journey. And at the time, we kept saying we were treating our customers as a monolith. And when you have 100,000 customers, you have 200,000 customers, that quickly starts to fall apart because not all of your customers are the same.

They don't interact with the brand the same way. And so I decided to start us on a segmentation journey about what would it mean to treat our customers differently? And ultimately that evolved into let's have a loyalty program to be able to have a banner to be able to treat them differently. But that data journey started back in 2018, um, but that led us to starting our SISL Society loyalty program in 2024.

Okay. When you look at your role, uh, what's the biggest challenge you face? I mean, what's the biggest opportunity you say uh face as the chief commercial officer, either uh with regard to customer loyalty or customer experience or just the brand itself? You know, what is the biggest opportunity you see?

I think the biggest opportunity I see is optimizing the and finding the right amount of places for people to find our product. Um ButcherBox has been online since the beginning. We're you know, digitally native company. But I think when it comes to growth, I think there's always this question of how much can you have in retail?

How much can you have online? And I think being able to optimize that and making sure that especially when you go beyond the subscription or beyond direct to consumer, that we can still offer that same level of loyalty and excitement that we do for our online customers when we go into retailers. And so being able to make that experience happen across the board, I would say, is a huge part of where I spend my time share. Excellent.

And when you look at your customers, you talked about not treating them uh the same, treating them differently based on kind of what you know all about them and being a data geek makes that uh uh very uh kind of passionate for you, I would assume as well. You know, when you look at your customers changing, especially as you broaden the offering, you how do you see them changing with with your with you and your brand and maybe within the industry of verticals that that uh you are akin to?

Yeah, I think it's you know it's fascinating. We have customers who've also been with us for 10 years, which shout out to them. Um they've seen us through every stage of growth. So they've also grown up.

They're like completely different segments than they started as, right? And I think sometimes we forget that when we slice and dice our customers. It's like they're at the perfect age of average age of 38, but many of these customers started with us when they were 28 and starting their fitness journeys, right? And that's why they came to us and then they had kids.

And so I think that, you know, growing and evolving with our customers as their lives change, as more people enter their household, as maybe they become empty nesters, whatever that might look like, making sure that we can always meet them kind of where they are in their journey. Um, and I think we can see those changes happen when someone selects a box, they stop selecting chicken nuggets all of a sudden. And it's probably because, you know, their kids left the house and they're eating more ribeyes um for date night at home or whatever that might look like.

And so I think we are particularly attuned to that given being in the online, you know, retailer space. I think it's been really fun to watch our customers change. So when you look at the younger generations, many brands are uh, you know, looking at ways to kind of create engagement, create customer loyalty programs, the right customer experience. Oftentimes the customers may want a little more than they necessarily earn in the program, right?

They may want that uh that top-tier status when they've shopped from you three times, right? But when you look at engaging the younger generation, how are you approaching that at butcher box? Yeah, I think for sure, across all generations, we're seeing that people overwhelmingly need more convenience. I think a lot of people came out of COVID and they're like, I have way less time than I had during COVID, whether they were at home or whether they were just slowing down.

A lot of people move to, you know, slower paces of life. Um, but as life has kind of returned, I think that people just need that convenience. One thing that's unique about the younger generation is that they don't really want to touch their food products, which makes it a little hard when you're, you know, serving uh raw proteins. It means that like if they don't want to season it, it's not gonna taste that great.

Or if they don't want to touch it, that's gonna be a little hard. And so we're always trying to find new ways to excite them. And what we say is that a lot of our customers know how to cook, but we need to inspire them. Um, and so we own that that's a job that we have to get done.

It's not teaching them how to necessarily dice and slice, it's really teaching them how to, you know, keep excited about making chicken thighs probably three to four nights a week, um, but also minimizing touching in some ways. And so that makes it, you know, a little bit more difficult for sure. But I think that they're also a generation that's extremely online. And as a brand that started online, that's a huge opportunity for us.

Okay. Can you tell us a little bit about ButcherBox's customer loyalty program, SISL Society? How does it work? Uh, how do you engage with it?

What are some of the benefits to the brand and that customer for being a part? Yeah, so ButcherBox's program has three different tiers. So you start off as a Sioux chef. So the day that you join ButcherBox, you become a loyalty member.

So it's an auto-opt-in program, which was a huge intentional part of us building out this program that we didn't want to feel like we were gatekeeping it or worrying more about getting people to sign up for the program. And the nature of being in a subscription is that you're kind of already doing some form of loyalty, right? Like you're telling them I'm gonna get something every month or so. And so it felt like, you know what, let's just auto-opt them in because they have accounts with us and we want to see how that goes.

So that's led to, I think, great engagement and just buys goodwill of our customers that we're not chasing them for like random opt-ins to a program that only gives them um opportunity. They don't pay for it. Um, and so you just have to be a butcher box subscriber. So that sous chef kind of covers that beginning journey that someone's in.

The next level is head chef, and then the final level is executive chef. And so as you move up through the tiers, there are a lot of different benefits. I would say one of the most sought-after benefits is in that executive chef tier that for ButcherBox, we have a lot of um retention offers that we do. So we have bacon for life, which we kind of became famous off of.

And now everyone offers their four life deal. But when we started doing that, we asked customers as we built out the program, like, what would you most want? And people were like, I would love to just switch my for life. I like don't need bacon in every single box.

And it's something that it really highlights the need of talking to your customers directly and asking them what they want, because it's not something we intentionally never did. It just never crossed our mind that you might get tired of getting the same free thing in your box every single month. So we offer that as an exclusive perk of the executive chef tier. And then we've rolled out a pretty exclusive uh top tier called the Chef's Table, where we go around to different cities and reward our customers for their loyalty in person since we knew we wanted to get back to seeing people face to face beyond the screen, especially being a direct-to-consumer brand.

Okay. When was the program launched? Uh, I think you could may have touched on it a little bit. And when you look at the launch and you talked about it, people being used to the subscription, you know, what role does it play within the overall butcher bot, butcher box customer experience offering and the brand loyalty piece?

Yeah. So we launched it back in 2024 in October. Uh, and so we have barely been at it for two years. And for us, I would say it plays a huge part into what ultimately is to become for the goal for every customer to become loyal to our brand.

There were more and more entrants into our space. Um, I would say we enjoyed a fair amount of years where our main competitor was just really the grocery store. And then there were more and more folks kind of coming online. And so we always felt like we were offering our customers a lot of these different retention tactics, but didn't have like a banner to put this under.

And so launching that has really helped us be able to say this is a perk at this tier, and it's really easy to lay out instead of just saying, hey, group of people, you get this perk and it's unclear on where to find it. So I think it's also given us a really major opportunity for organization of clarity of how we're giving back value to customers. And I think we're just getting started as we continue to dig deeper into like what does our brand mean to customers? And it has a home to put all of these different offers.

Excellent. You know, Butcher Box was recently uh recognized as the silver in the premium and subscription loyalty program. When you step back and you look at the program, what are you most proud of? I'm most proud of the fact that our program was so intentionally designed that we can say we're proud of it in the first year.

Like it doesn't feel like one where we're like, oh, you know, we're still getting a lot of the kinks out. Like I feel like we are in such a great space and we are only getting started. But the fact that we can win an award such as this one and to be recognized in other spaces and to be considered loyalty leaders is a huge um kudos to the intentionality of the loyalty leader on my team of the brand that we've built over the past um 11 years. And I think has a lot to do with that fact that we started with being customer obsessed on day one.

And so goes a lot of um thanks to obviously our CEO and founder, Mike Salguero, to be able to do that. So then we have a brand that people actually want to be in a loyalty program in because it isn't built just out of thin air. It's built off of a brand that people have been loyal to. Okay.

And when you look at the program, you've talked about this a little bit, uh, the segmentation, the uniqueness. Why do you think it has resonated so much with the customers? I think because we listened to them. We asked them and we listened.

Like we didn't build a program that was just about points. That was another component of it. So there are a lot of loyalty programs that are out there that, you know, you get your points and then you cash in your points in your next purchase, which is totally fine. But for us, we knew we needed to do something more than that.

So we asked a lot of questions of our customers. We asked them what they wanted, what loyalty programs were they in, which ones didn't they like? What do they think actually gave them value? And I think that, you know, it sounds simple, like just listen to your customers.

But we're very lucky. Our customers are very chatty. We have a very high open rate and response rate for our surveys, which is good and you know, sometimes hard to take in all of the feedback. But it's great because it means that they give us so much room to grow and they're here to grow with us and um have given us graces.

We've built this brand, and they continue to kind of be the backbone of the company that we build out. Okay. When you look at uh customer loyalty, one of the great things about the role that I have is I get to talk to smart people like you who have passion about the brand and passionate about their customer. But we always like to understand how you define customer loyalty.

So, you know, when you look at customer loyalty, what does it mean to you and to ButcherBox? Customer loyalty to me and to ButcherBox means that when you're thinking about your day, that ButcherBox is a part of that, especially given the product that we serve, right? So we have a product that presumably you should, you're probably cooking it every single day. There are some products out there where you don't need to use it every day.

And that's a different kind of loyalty. But for us, it's that butcher box is a center part of that conversation when meal time comes up, that we make you feel like a hero, that maybe you even forget that you use butcher box in some way, shape, or form, because we make it so easy by the quality being so good, it makes the meal much better. Um, and that when you think about kind of your wallet and your wallet share, if you're still buying meat and seafood, that you're always considering butcher box and not ever considering switching.

But I would say ultimately that we are a center part of that conversation and a center part of their plate. Okay. When you look at uh AI, big discussion a couple of weeks back at the 2026 Loyalty Expo, and I'm sure it's going to be a bigger topic at the CSS this fall. But you know, how are you looking at AI and how can it enhance your customer experience efforts?

I think AI has a lot of great space in between the expertise of the folks running the company and the voice of the customer program that we have, especially at ButcherBox. Because for us, we have a lot of knowledge about meat and seafood and all the different cuts and how to cook them and what kinds of recipes, like why you should use a flank steak here instead of using a ribeye there. Um, and we know all of those components, but then we also have tons of customer feedback about what their hard parts are of their day.

We can see where they're struggling online. We look at everything from like how long is someone hovering on a button? Uh, and so I think having AI to be able to combine what we know behaviorally about people online, what we know in their meat choices, as well as the expertise that we have in meat and seafood will be a great help to making sure customers can get what they need from us and ultimately for us to fulfill all the jobs we have to be done for our customers. Excellent.

So when you step back, um, you know, what's next for uh your customer loyalty customer experience efforts at uh ButcherBox? Well, we just re- we just migrated our loyalty platform, which is super exciting. Um, so we moved from another provider and we also redid our entire back end of our site. And so now we'll be even more positioned to be able to offer way more challenges and fun gamification to our customers, such as like if you order every single type of protein, like you get a badge and you get points.

And so being able to play on all of these things that I think also bring ButcherBox's brand to life, quite honestly, but also bring the things that we know make someone a successful customer to life and being able to marry that. So I think there's a lot more to watch and a lot more that will be even more fun than where we are today. Excellent. And last question what can Loyalty 360 do to help you and your team with your customer loyalty?

I would say that Loyalty360 can help with, especially I think having those conversations with other brands, because there's only so many brands that I can personally be uh a subscriber to, although my team would say that I challenge the limits of what's possible every single day on how many products you can buy. Um I would say that being able to talk to other brands because I think our customers are all floating around generally the same spaces. We can all talk about segmenting our customers, even though I said that's a large part of our work.

Ultimately, customers are kind of all moving in the same ways. And I think that making sure there's community around loyalty is really important and it's something that you all do and can continue to do well to help brands. Excellent. Uh well, thank you very much for that.

Uh I think we also have a few quick fire questions. Uh, hopefully you're prepared for them. We like to keep them short, a minute or so. Oh, you know, when you look at customer loyalty, what customer loyalty programs do you belong to?

Oh, so many. Um, as I said, I challenge the limits of what's possible. Um, I'm in a few. Uh, I'm a big ultra uh loyalty person.

I'm in the diamond tier um because I love a lot of hair tools. So I would say that that's like the biggest one that I am in, but I'm in a ton of them. What brand are you most loyal to? Besides Butcher Box, um, I would say the brand that I am most loyal to is probably Lego.

Okay, excellent. You must have a few kids then. I don't. Um I have they got me addicted at an early age, and they're I have never considered that there would ever be an alternative to buying a Lego.

I'm like, this is just Yeah, that's good. Yeah, uh that's great. My daughter Lilithson as well. So um, and the son, and I got a bunch of them back there, so but it's good.

Uh, you know, when you look at partnerships, what would be an ideal partnership for you? I think an ideal partnership for ButcherBox would be another food brand who is on a mission to do things the right way, have a clean label, um, foreshadowing some uh partnerships we're looking at right now, but really other food brands who are really trying to do things the right way, because I think what consumers want most is someone to make it easy. Excellent. And a last question you have, uh, you know, what motivates you when tackling challenges at ButcherBox?

What motivates me is ultimately the brand and the vision and the mission for ButcherBox. ButcherBox's mission is to become the world's first beloved meat brand. And I've believed in that since day one, that there aren't any meat brands that people can think of. And if they can think of more than three, they don't necessarily love them.

Um, and so I think there's a ton of space for us to be able to become the world's first beloved meat brand. And I think that means that all challenges are solvable in efforts to win that mission. Riva, thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today and sharing your insights on how ButcherBox continues to build customer loyalty through consistency, convenience, and a very unique subscription-based experience that's centered on trust and truly meeting customers' needs.

Uh, it was quite impactful to hear. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. Also, I wanted to thank everyone else for uh taking the time to join today.

Make sure you join us every Thursday for a new episode of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty Podcast, the Brand Stories Edition. And don't forget to subscribe and follow us on YouTube across our social media channels that are listed below in the comments section. Until next week, have a wonderful day.