Costco Sells A 4-Pound Steak Box — But Is It Worth The Price Tag?

There isn’t much that outshines a really good steak. Whether it’s given a careful sous vide reverse sear or simply tossed on the grill, a nice cut of beef is a wonderful thing — especially when it comes with a reasonable price tag. If you’ve seen the Rastelli’s Grass-Fed Angus Steak Box at your local Costco, it may have jumped out at you. The offering features a wide variety of different cuts of steak — all of them grass fed, wet aged, and antibiotic free — but it doesn’t come cheap, with a retail price of $139.99. But despite the fact that beef has been rising in price for years, this Costco bulk buy really isn’t giving you a deal.

The Rastelli’s package in question contains eight steaks — two 5-ounce filet mignons, two 6-ounce sirloins, two 10-ounce NY strips, and two 10-ounce ribeyes — as well as a couple of 1-ounce packages of Himalayan pink salt. All together, that’s just under four pounds of pure grass-fed beef, for an average cost of about $36 a pound. By weight, that may be a bit inexpensive for the filets, but when you average it out across all of the steak varieties, it is a bit pricey.

Given that you have to buy this set in bulk at Costco, you might expect that the price would be lower than what you’d find at your local grocery store. And yet, that is not the case either. By just about any metric, Costco’s Rastelli’s steak box is not a particularly good deal — and this is especially true if instead you go straight to the supplier.

Rastelli’s has an online store where you can peruse all the same products found in this Costco package, mixing and matching them to better suit your preferences. If you like the variety of four different cuts, you can make the exact same box, but you can also, say, drop the sirloins and replace them with another brace of ribeyes. Going straight to the source has another advantage as well: It’s actually a bit cheaper. If you put together the same selection of steaks that come in the Costco package, the total comes out to closer $119.96.

As a bonus, the filet mignons on the Rastelli’s website are listed at 6 ounces each, which is 20% larger than those in the Costco package. So, putting the package together yourself results in a fair bit more of the most premium cut as well as a lower price tag — you can’t really beat that. Though, there are a couple of catches. First off, the Rastelli’s website has a minimum order size of $125, meaning that this exact selection comes in just below the cutoff. That’s not so bad, though, as you can add 12 ounces of hardwood-smoked bacon for just $9.99. With that, you’ll still be under the Costco price — and you’ll be bringing home the bacon as well.

The second catch, however, is that orders under $200 come with a $19.99 shipping fee. The Costco package is about $20 more expensive, so, the two options come out almost the same, aside from the larger filets in the direct order. In the end, this package certainly isn’t delivering serious savings on Costco steaks, but for a wide variety of high-quality beef it isn’t too bad either.