How Capptive8 cut CAC by 52%, doubled new customer ROAS, and generated over 10,000 new customers per month for the Blue Apron co-founder's regenerative chicken brand.
Cooks Venture was founded by Matthew Wadiak, co-founder and former COO of Blue Apron, with a mission to fix what's broken in America's chicken industry. The company bred its own proprietary slow-growth heritage chicken - the Pioneer - raised on pasture using regenerative farming practices, with no antibiotics, no GMOs, and air-chilled processing. It was the only vertically integrated chicken producer in the country with an independent genetics program.
The result was chicken that tasted the way chicken is supposed to taste - lean, flavorful, and clean. The brand raised over $60 million in funding, sold through its DTC channel and retailers like Whole Foods and Thrive Market, and built a passionate following of health-conscious consumers who were willing to pay a premium for a product they could trust.
Cooks Venture had a product consumers loved - but no reliable way to acquire new customers at a cost that made the business work. Previous agencies had failed to deliver results, and the DTC channel was stuck at a modest level of spend with acquisition costs too high to scale.
For a premium product priced at roughly double the cost of conventional grocery store chicken, the margin for error on customer acquisition was thin. Every dollar of ad spend needed to bring in buyers who would convert and come back - not one-time trial shoppers. The brand needed to scale fast enough to justify its production infrastructure while keeping CAC within targets that sustained profitability.
A four-pillar system built to scale a premium food brand from startup spend to category dominance in 90 days.
Before writing a line of ad copy, Capptive8 went deep into understanding both the product and the consumer psychology behind it. We studied the chicken industry, mined Facebook comments to uncover the emotional triggers driving purchase decisions, and identified the ideal customer profile. One comment - a customer saying Cooks Venture was the best chicken they'd had since growing up on their parents' farm - shaped the entire creative strategy from that point forward.
In the chicken category, education is the sale. Capptive8 built creative around moments of revelation - side-by-side comparisons of conventional versus pasture-raised chicken, educational breakdowns of industry practices, and UGC content that made people stop scrolling. One unexpected winner: a six-second looping clip of someone eating chicken with their fingers. It sparked a massive debate in the comments, drove virality, and converted at scale. The creative didn't look like a typical ad. That's exactly why it worked.
With winning creatives in hand, Capptive8 scaled the ad account from $50,000 to $300,000 per month within 90 days. Our creative testing methodology produced winners at a rate far above industry standard, which meant we could sustain performance even as spend increased 6x. Each winning concept was iterated with variations to extend its lifespan, while new concepts were continuously tested to prevent creative fatigue.
We optimized Meta's algorithm to find net-new customers at scale - not just retarget warm audiences. By refining the signal sent back to Meta, we ensured the algorithm was spending on high-converting, high-value buyers who were genuinely new to the brand. This drove both volume and quality: over 10,000 new customers per month, acquired at a CAC 52% lower than what the brand was paying before Capptive8.
Within 90 days, Cooks Venture went from struggling to acquire customers to generating over 10,000 new orders per month - at half the acquisition cost.
CAC Reduction
cost per acquisition
New Customer ROAS
increase
Monthly Ad Spend
scaled in 90 days
New Customers/Month
at peak scale
Conversion Rate
improvement
Inventory Impact
demand exceeded supply
"We'd worked with other agencies that couldn't move the needle. Capptive8 came in and within three months completely transformed our DTC acquisition. They didn't just understand Meta - they understood the chicken industry, our consumer, and how to tell our story in a way that converted. The speed and scale of results exceeded anything we'd projected."
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We help eCommerce brands scale acquisition profitably - cutting CAC, improving signal quality, and building the creative systems that sustain growth at scale.
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