How Capptive8 built the acquisition engine behind Sun Basket's explosive growth - managing $30M+ in Meta spend, cutting CAC by 47%, and scaling to 25,000 new subscribers per month.
Sun Basket is the #1 organic meal kit provider in the United States. Founded by entrepreneur Adam Zbar and Chef Justine Kelly - former head chef at The Slanted Door, a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in San Francisco - the company ships fresh, USDA-certified organic ingredients and chef-designed recipes to households across the country every week. Celebrity chef Tyler Florence serves as culinary co-founder.
The brand raised over $125 million in total funding, including a strategic investment from Unilever Ventures, and built the largest distribution footprint of any direct-to-consumer organic food company in the country - reaching 98% of US ZIP codes through three distribution centers. Investors noted that Sun Basket had industry-leading customer retention rates, with three times the retention of major competitors.
Sun Basket had everything a meal kit brand needs to win - a best-in-class product, a passionate customer base, and strong retention once someone subscribed. What they didn't have was a way to acquire new subscribers at scale on Meta without blowing past their CAC targets.
The account was stuck at $5,000 a day in ad spend - a fraction of what was needed to compete in a category where Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and a wave of well-funded competitors were all fighting for the same customer. For a subscription business, the math is brutal: if CAC is too high relative to how long a subscriber stays, every new customer loses money. Sun Basket needed an acquisition partner who understood not just how to drive sign-ups, but how to find the right subscribers - people who would stay on the plan month after month - at a cost that made the unit economics work.
A four-pillar system that turned a $5K/day ad account into a $100K/day growth engine - without sacrificing subscriber quality.
The single biggest inflection point in Sun Basket's growth was the shift to video creative. Before Capptive8 introduced video into the testing mix, the account was running primarily on static images with modest results. Video transformed performance - driving dramatically lower CAC, higher engagement, and scale velocity that allowed spend to double day over day. We built an entire creative engine around video production and testing, producing thousands of variations with a compounding database of insights that made every subsequent test smarter and faster.
Not all meal kit subscribers are equal. Capptive8 mapped out distinct audience segments - athletes, busy urban professionals, mothers managing family nutrition, health-conscious consumers on Paleo, Keto, and Mediterranean diets - and analyzed which segments converted at the highest rates and stayed the longest. We built dedicated creative and offers for each segment, and optimized Meta's signal to prioritize high-retention, high-LTV cohorts. This wasn't just about acquiring more subscribers - it was about acquiring the right ones.
Capptive8's creative testing goes deeper than most agencies would ever think to go. We discovered that a single poached egg centered in an image consistently drove 20–40% higher click-through rates. We found that showing exactly three meals in a specific triangular layout outperformed every other combination. These insights come from a disciplined methodology where every variable is isolated, every result is recorded, and every learning compounds into the next round. Over the partnership, we ran thousands of creative tests with a 30%+ win rate - six times the industry average.
Going from $5,000 a day to $100,000 a day in Meta spend is not just about finding winners - it's about knowing how to scale them without destroying performance. Capptive8 built a structured scaling system that maintained efficiency at every stage of growth, combining continuous creative production (to prevent fatigue), disciplined audience expansion (to avoid saturation), and real-time optimization of signal quality to ensure Meta's algorithm was always finding net-new, high-value subscribers.
Over a 2+ year partnership, Capptive8 managed over $30 million in Meta spend for Sun Basket - scaling the account from $5,000 a day to $100,000 a day while cutting CAC by 47% and reducing churn by up to 40%.
Monthly Ad Spend
scaled from $150K
CAC Reduction
cost per acquisition
New Subscribers/Month
at peak scale
Churn Reduction
subscriber retention
LTV Improvement
lifetime value
Conversion Rate
improvement
"Capptive8 fundamentally changed how we approach acquisition. They didn't just scale our spend - they built a system that consistently found high-value subscribers at a cost that made our unit economics work. Their understanding of creative testing, audience segmentation, and the subscription model gave us a level of confidence in our growth engine that we'd never had before. The results speak for themselves."
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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.
Performance marketing for e-commerce brands. 15 years of scaling brands on Meta.
