How Shipping Automation Helps Meat Church Handle 2,000 Orders a Day at Peak Season

Jack Osborn spends his Novembers watching a warehouse in Waxahachie, Texas, fill with turkey kits. As Warehouse and Fulfillment Supervisor for Meat Church BBQ, he knows the order queue is about to pile up fast, and every box that goes out the door on time is one less family staring at a bare cutting board on Thanksgiving.

From a competition show to thousands of orders a day

Meat Church didn’t start out shipping thousands of orders a day. The brand launched when founder Matt Pittman competed on an episode of BBQ Pitmasters, and meatchurch.com opened with just a handful of orders. The company built its name on seasonings and how-to videos aimed at giving first-time backyard grillers the confidence to nail a cook, while keeping longtime pitmasters coming back for something new.

That mix of beginner and competition-level customers has fueled steady growth. Today, Meat Church ships between 10,000 and 15,000 orders a month, four times what it shipped four years ago.

Finding a shipping partner that could grow with them

Osborn said the moment that growth became real was the brand’s first holiday season. Orders started flying in, a good number of them from returning customers, and the team knew they’d built something that customers wanted to come back for.

ShipStation was already part of the operation by then, in place since day one. As Meat Church scaled, ShipStation scaled with it, which meant the team never had to stop and rebuild its shipping process mid-growth.

“The simplicity of ShipStation was a big attraction to us from day one,” Osborn said.

ShipStation’s automation is what lets a small, lean team keep pace with a fast-growing brand rather than getting buried by it.

Automation that handles the repetitive work

Day-to-day, that automation shows up in the specifics of how Meat Church’s warehouse runs. Batch processing lets the team print prepacks like the Ocho and the Fab 5 in bulk, all at once, instead of one order at a time. Presets and automation rules make sure the right label lands on the right box every time, cutting down on the manual errors that used to eat into the team’s day.

The time isn’t just saved, it’s redirected. Freed from repetitive label work, the team can focus on the parts of fulfillment that actually need a person’s judgment.

Keeping pace when peak season hits

Peak season is where the payoff shows up most. A normal day at Meat Church brings in 300 to 500 orders. Peak season, which starts the last week of October as customers stock up for Thanksgiving and rolls straight into Christmas, can bring in around 2,000 orders in a single day, an increase of as much as 567%.

Osborn points to the organization built into ShipStation and the speed of printing labels as what gets the team through it: no wasted time, no wasted movement, and no guessing where a specific order is in the queue.

Last November put that to the test. A surge in orders for Meat Church’s turkey kit combos piled up fast, and the team needed to move without slowing down to manage the mechanics of printing.

“As the order queue quickly piled up, we could focus on fulfillment without being bogged down by the intricacies of the printing process,” Osborn said.

ShipStation handled label generation and tracking in the background, and the team kept its speed and accuracy through one of its most critical weeks of the year.

What a late package really costs

Osborn sees what’s riding on every delivery. Meat Church’s seasonings show up in restaurants, at competitions, and in gift boxes, and a late package doesn’t just miss a delivery window. It misses a cookout, a gathering, a moment a customer built their week around.

Advice for brands still figuring out their shipping

Osborn carries that weight into every peak season, which is part of why he tells other growing brands to do their homework before picking a shipping platform. Meat Church made the call on day one and has spent four years scaling without ever looking back.

If your order volume is starting to outpace your process, see what shipping automation can do before your next peak season hits. Start shipping with ShipStation today.