Flash-frozen USDA Prime brisket from Wild Fork Foods.
A whole, USDA Prime brisket for $2.98 a pound? Yes, please! That’s a price I’ve encountered only once before, during a sale at H.E.B. in Austin, and it’s not much more than I pay for Choice at Walmart. Plus it’s shipped for free in a giant cooler box with dry ice, and arrives hard as a rock and ready to transfer to your own freezer for warm weather smoking.
This bargain comes from Wild Fork Foods, a mail order purveyor which recently started showing up in my Facebook feed. I generally assume such offers are bait-and-switch, with some kind of membership commitment or other strings attached, but couldn’t find any so decided to take a chance and a few days later the aforementioned brisket arrived at my door.
There are a few quirks. Initially, the brisket in the ad was “back soon” and would not move to my cart when I clicked the link; a call to customer service revealed this means out of stock but “we’re expecting a truck tomorrow” and sure enough the item was in stock a couple of days later. Also, your credit card will be authorized for an amount larger than the advertised price just in case the cut is bigger than the estimate. But they promise the price will be adjusted when the actual item ships, and it was.
Wild Fork shipping box, as it arrived at my door.
First order shipping is free; after that you’ll pay $10 for overnight shipping which certainly does not cover the cost of packing (the brisket came wrapped in an ecologically appropriate roll of butcher paper, which I’ll save for my smoking experience, inside a Styrofoam cooler) let alone the actual transport. So what’s going on here?
A little research reveals that Wild Fork is a division of JBS Foods, a global wholesaler (with some unsavory associations in Brazil in the past, but they’re certainly not alone in that) which is apparently trying to establish a mail order footprint with very aggressive pricing. Are these prices competing with the retailers JBS sells to? Is it all too good to be true?
Inside the Wild Fork shipping box.
I don’t know, but I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts. (I purchased with PayPal, which has an excellent buyer protection program.) Right now beef sweetbreads at $2.98/lb are “back soon” but duck legs are in stock at $7.98 a pound along with that $2.98/lb brisket. Check it out.
