How Finding the Right Gifting Buyer Drove +323% Revenue Growth
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.
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 research framework specifically to the gifting segment, the answer was surprising. And when MeatWorks rebuilt its strategy around it, with Zest providing the platform to deliver on it, gift orders grew 81%, and gift revenue grew 323% year-over-year. (All without increasing ad spend.)
See how matching fresh insights with the right infrastructure leads to food and beverage brands tapping their full potential.
The Problem: A Gifting Channel That Should Have Been Working (But Wasn't)
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.
Running four phases to find one clear answer.
Schaefer ran a four-phase engagement designed to surface the real buyer and build a strategy around them.
Audit
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.
Research
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.
Strategy
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.
Testing
Campaigns launched against the new strategy and were optimized from live performance data. The results validated the approach quickly and kept compounding.
Same Product. Wrong Audience.
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.
However, the research told a very different story.
The discovery that changed everything.
The most valuable gifting customer wasn't a younger dad buying for himself or his household. Scratch that image from your mind and fast-forward a few years.
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.
And when targeting, creative, and messaging were rebuilt around this segment, everything changed.
The Solution: Schaefer Found the Buyer. Zest Built the Bridge
Knowing who the gifting buyer was solved half the problem. The other half was finding the right tools to reach them.
Before working with Zest, MeatWorks faced a challenge that stops most F&B (food and beverage) brands before they ever scale a gifting channel: the technology wasn't there. Most online brands manage their gifting channel with practically archaic methods usually involving a landing page that's hard to find, a contact form, and weeks of back-and-forth between the customer and a support person on the other end.
It's a process that's full of friction, frustration, and cart abandonment.
The alternative to seeking out a platform that's ready out of the box was building it from scratch. This means custom code, a months-long project, a significant engineering investment, and a timeline that doesn't survive contact with a holiday window.
With bottomless potential and newfound information that was good as gold, MeatWorks couldn't afford to not go with the first-of-its-kind ecommerce gifting platform, Zest.
With Zest in their tech stack, the issue of finding the right tools to reach the right people was solved within 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, and it had finally put to rest our 6-month-long search for gifting solutions for corporate and consumer gifts. Our all-too-common plight of downloading Shopify apps, meeting with sales agents, and watching demo after demo was finally over.
We met the team at Zest and the platform made sense, had features every other tool on the market was missing, and a team we could actually talk strategy with. MeatWorks went live in early October 2025, ahead of the peak holiday gifting window, and the channel performed immediately.
Purpose-built customer experiences erased the drama of online gifting. Instead of clicking around contact forms or working out the logistics of gift notes and gift delivery on their own, MeatWorks' target audience was met with a gifting checkout as easy as buying for themselves. In lieu of outdated contact forms, an optimized gifting storefront gave customers the simplest way to send gifts to one or tons of people in just a few clicks.
Zest provided the gifting platform infrastructure, seamless Shopify Plus integration, consumer and corporate gifting flows, and the operational tools to deliver on the strategy at scale. With Zest, Schaefer was able to set up MeatWorks with purchase pathways and experiences they had been missing all along:
- White-labeled self-service gifting storefronts.
- Gifting features to meet any gifting intent — one-to-one, one-to-many, shipped directly, e-gifting via email or text, sent instantly or scheduled for later.
- On-brand consumer gifting integrated directly into Shopify Plus checkout.
- Gift notes, multi-address shipping, and seamless checkout. No third-party redirects.
- Centralized corporate dashboard for large, custom, bulk, and concierge gift orders.
- Automated invoicing, discounts, and shipping and tracking updates.
- Full order visibility. Every gift, every status, at any scale.
Schaefer brought the buyer insight. Zest brought the infrastructure. The combination is what the partnership is built to replicate.
The Results: Revenue Grew at 4X the Rate of Orders
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 four times. 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 and serving them a frictionless experience. Research is what tells you who that person is.
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.
Why This Ratio Matters for Food and Beverage Gifting Brands
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.
Built to Replicate This for Your Brand
No anomalies here — the MeatWorks result isn't a one-off. It's a repeatable process for any F&B brand with the right product, the right platform, and the willingness to find out who's actually buying it.
The four-step engagement designed by Schaefer is the tried and true process to uncovering a brand's true MVP buyer. Once a core audience of shoppers is distilled from the data, the team at Schaefer gets to work pairing new insights with the tools that can tap the opportunities that had laid dormant. When it came to MeatWorks' goal of growing their gifting program, Zest was a no-brainer. It was the only online gifting platform that could bring Schaefer's action plan to life and deliver real results in just one holiday gifting season.
No more guessing games. No more outdated purchase journeys or platforms that only checked a box or two. No more untapped potential.
Real growth through gifting is possible when you simply give people the smoothest path to purchase.
About Schaefer: Research + Strategy + Creative
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.
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.
Research-Backed Gifting Growth Strategy: $10,000
- Consumer research. Who your gifting buyer actually is and what motivates them.
- Paid media audit. Surface wasted spend and missed demand signals.
- Gifting growth strategy. Targeting, messaging, and occasion-based activation calendar.
- 3 ad concepts. Built from the research, ready to test.
- Launch-ready media plan. Platform recommendations, budget allocation, campaign structure.
Campaign management available as a monthly retainer add-on.
