Since its founding in 2015, ButcherBox has built a strong position in the direct-to-consumer market by offering premium meat subscriptions, surpassing $550 million in annual revenue and serving over 415,000 active subscribers. However, behind the scenes, its loyalty program was reaching a breaking point. Originally developed in-house, the system became increasingly difficult to scale and lacked the flexibility needed to evolve with the business.
By late 2024, ButcherBox decided to migrate from its internal rewards infrastructure to Voucherify. The goal wasn’t just to replace existing functionality, but to future-proof the program with deeper personalization, stronger automation, and a closer connection to the rest of its composable tech stack, including Shopify, Segment, Klaviyo, and Contentful.
Key challenges
- Supporting 400k+ members while keeping the loyalty system fast and reliable.
- Connecting the loyalty logic with their composable stack (Shopify, Segment, Klaviyo, Contentful).
- Enabling gamification and highly tailored rewards, driven by both transactional and behavioral triggers.
- Migrating historical tier and point data (~1 million records) with minimal risk and downtime.
The migration challenge
ButcherBox’s loyalty program wasn’t small. With more than 400,000 active members and hundreds of thousands of orders processed monthly, migrating this system required not just technical precision but also close coordination between both teams. Beyond the system complexity, the business needed to ensure a smooth, bump-free transition for customers as any downtime or missteps could risk hard-earned customer trust.
The migration strategy kicked off in December 2024 with a clear, phased roadmap co-developed with Voucherify’s support team. Voucherify played a key role from the outset, guiding ButcherBox through foundational steps such as internal team training, mapping loyalty-related events, and replicating program logic in a sandbox environment. Throughout this phase, Voucherify provided tech consultations and hands-on assistance to ensure the program’s earning rules, tier progression, and redemption mechanics were accurately modelled and ready for testing.
One of the most critical phases of the migration was handling historical data. ButcherBox needed to transfer more than a million records spanning several years of customer transactions. Voucherify provided structured guidance on the data import process, recommending a two-step approach to minimize risk and maintain data integrity.
First, ButcherBox imported historical order data using Voucherify’s secure, authenticated APIs, ensuring encrypted data transfer and consistent order history before any points were migrated. Once validated, the teams coordinated the migration of loyalty points and tier statuses using Voucherify’s CSV import tools, with data sent through secure channels. Voucherify supplied pre-validated templates, enforced strict format checks, and reviewed all files to prevent errors and ensure a safe, accurate migration.
Throughout the migration, Voucherify remained deeply involved, reviewing campaign configurations, assisting with edge cases, and ensuring every technical detail was covered. Voucherify’s support extended into the testing phase, where ButcherBox ran comprehensive user acceptance testing across all environments, including frontend, backend, and operational workflows.
Once the program passed all validation checkpoints, ButcherBox finalized the migration and launched the new loyalty system in March 2025, completing the transition in just under four months, with zero customer disruption.
Solution
How does the new loyalty engine work?
With Voucherify at its core, ButcherBox re-launched its loyalty program, Sizzle Society, built around a simple premise: reward both transactional activity and customer engagement.
Members earn two points for every dollar spent. Once they accumulate 1,000 points (the equivalent of $10) they can redeem points as store credits, unlocking discounts on future orders.
But the heart of the program lies in its tier structure. Members move through three loyalty tiers – Sous Chef, Head Chef, and Executive Chef – based not on spending, but on the number of orders placed within a rolling 12-month window. This subtle shift drives repeat purchases over short-term spending. Members need to maintain consistent ordering to keep their tier benefits, which include perks like priority shipping, anniversary gifts, and exclusive product access.
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Behind the scenes, Voucherify automates the entire system. Customer orders automatically generate points, which expire after 12 months, encouraging steady engagement. Advanced validation rules ensure that points, tiers, and rewards function precisely according to the program’s logic.
One of the program’s standout features is auto-redemption. Once a customer reaches the 1,000-point threshold, ButcherBox automatically grants a reward, either a discount or a digital gift card. Next, members decide when and how to redeem them.
Beyond transactions, ButcherBox plans to use Voucherify’s custom events to drive gamification. Soon, customers will be able to earn points for a range of actions, from opting into SMS programs and moving their billing dates to participating in cooking classes or engaging with recipe tools. These events will be fed into Voucherify via API, allowing the team to continuously expand loyalty earning opportunities without overhauling their core infrastructure.
Composable loyalty meets composable commerce
Alongside Voucherify, the team rebuilt key storefronts using Shopify’s official dev stack: Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Hydrogen, Shopify’s React-based framework built on Remix, gave ButcherBox a modular yet opinionated foundation tailored for commerce. It came with pre-built components, hooks, and utilities wired into Shopify APIs, accelerating both frontend development and experimentation. When ready to go live, ButcherBox deployed via Oxygen, Shopify’s globally distributed hosting layer, ensuring performance and uptime at scale.
Thanks to this modern architecture, ButcherBox could plug Voucherify into Shopify via middleware, seamlessly syncing loyalty logic and customer data across the stack.
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Loyalty built for experimentation
What makes this loyalty system truly future-proof is its flexibility. ButcherBox’s commercial and marketing teams can easily configure new campaigns and incentives, without touching production code.
Already, the team is exploring new campaign types designed to reward deeper engagement. One idea involves automatically upgrading customers to higher tiers when they enter specific segments, whether defined by Voucherify or Segment.
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By migrating to Voucherify, ButcherBox replaced its legacy loyalty infrastructure with a scalable API-first platform that offers deep personalization, automation, and room for rapid experimentation. The result is a highly flexible, fully integrated loyalty engine that not only rewards purchases but also drives customer engagement throughout the entire subscription journey, all without adding operational complexity.
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