Who decided beef jerky is just for dads?

Walk into any given gas station in the US, and you will find beef jerky pinned to the wall and scattered liberally at the end of the shelves. In grocery stores, packs of dried meat dangle next to the alcohol, as if the many square feet of top-to-bottom shelf space in the snack aisle wasn’t enough.

And yet somehow, the products all look the same, with dark packaging, bold fonts and the occasional bull motif being common visual hallmarks.

The meat snack category has been around for a very long time, with a narrow customer in mind. Much of this is down to one company, Jack Link's, which owns not just its namesake brand but also Slim Jim and Peperami. The audience, broadly speaking, is men: truck drivers, gym rats, hunters, dads at a barbecue. And the veteran brand mascots in the category have done little to broaden the appeal. Slim Jim spent years fronted by professional wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage, while Peperami’s adverts have seen its walking, talking meat stick mascot Animal dive headfirst into a blender, dress up in a feather boa and blond wig, and peel its own skin off. Now a new wave of founders is asking why these brands can’t make room for everyone else.

Fresh meat

“Nobody wants to be reminded that they're eating a cow. But every jerky brand has a cow or a bull on the packaging, and they all look the same,” says Nicole Schlesinger, the New York-based founder of Strip Jerky, which launched in January. “When you have a bag of bacon, there's no pig on the front.” Strip Jerky uses bright packaging with hand-illustrated mascots, and promotes itself as “stripped down to the good stuff”, referencing its six-item ingredient list. There's 30g of protein per bag, which Schlesinger says beats the vast majority of sweet protein bars on the market.

The smell was the other problem she set out to fix. “Jerky is a product you eat around other people,” she says. “On the airplane, in an office, on the bus. And the products that were out there smell so, so bad.” That whiff when you open a packet of jerky is caused by the wetness of the jerky itself, she says — a cheaper, higher-yield process that also produces a stronger aroma. Strip Jerky's drier product has less favorable margins, but solves the smell issue, which Schlesinger says this has won her a surprisingly loyal following among women. “A lot of girls message me and say ‘thank you for making this’, or ‘I'm a huge jerky lover and could never find something on the market that actually tasted good’.”

Schlesinger says she was inspired by brands like Fishwife, the tinned fish brand known for its fresh take on a category associated with being cheap and smelly. It made its product desirable by using bright, illustrated packaging and quality ingredients. “They made it fun and playful and nostalgic,” Schlesinger says. “And look how well they're doing.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, London-based Kennies is doing something similar for the British market. Founded by former Revolut executive Dayana Yermolayeva and Camilla Fisher Crouch, who previously worked in family law, the brand launched in late November with two salami stick flavors made from high-welfare pork and fewer than 10 ingredients. The founders met through Y Combinator’s founder matching service and had a product on the shelves within six months of first speaking.

“We bonded over the idea that neither of us really enjoy sweet snacks,” says Yermolayeva. “And we thought we probably weren't alone in that.” Kennies is targeting office snack baskets as a way to get its brand in front of people, a strategy inspired by their own experience of hitting the 3pm slump and finding themselves surrounded by sweet protein bars and packets of crisps. Yermolayeva says Kennies has agreements in place to stock several large UK corporate offices this year.

Strip Jerky and Kennies are not the only ones who have spotted a gap in this category. In Maine, Singing Pastures — founded by a ninth-generation farming family and now stocked at Sprouts and Costco — has explicitly built its product around women's wellness. Its grass-fed meat sticks contain bone broth and collagen among the ingredients list. Paleovalley, which has been around longer, has built a loyal following among health-conscious women by promoting clean ingredients and with packaging that is more refined than the average gas station snack.

Meat me in the snacking aisle

In the US, the meat snack market was valued at $12bn in 2025. It's small compared to the wider US protein market, valued at $114bn by Mintel in 2024. But for new brands, the gap represents room for growth.

Cultural winds are also blowing in the right direction. The appetite for animal products is returning after a decade of brands pushing vegan alternatives and struggling to make them deliver economically or culinarily. At the same time, the protein obsession that has seen everything from chips, jams, jelly, popcorn and even water become a vehicle for muscle-making macros has created an obvious opening for products where the protein is simply already there. “Gen Z are taking over the protein category,” says Schlesinger. “And jerky is the OG protein. You're eating meat. It doesn't get more protein than that.”

The pitch to retailers is tough for a new brand, though. A buyer who has stocked Jack Link's for 15 years doesn't need much convincing that salami sells, but they need to believe a new brand will move. The closest thing to a proof of concept is Chomps, a meat stick brand that launched in Chicago in 2012 and now brings in roughly $660m in annual sales. When the founders ran a brand study in 2018, they found that about 70% of their customers were women — something they hadn't planned for and had to scramble to lean into, redesigning their packaging with brighter colors and cleaner messaging. Chomps didn't set out to make a meat snack for women, but in updating the product it did make something that appealed to them. Newer entrants are working from a similar template, although several are being more explicit about who they're talking to.

Schlesinger says Strip Jerky has sold out every time it has launched a new batch. Kennies is sampling on the streets of London every weekend, and finding that as long as people aren't vegetarian, they tend to like it. Neither brand has cornered the market, but retailers are realising that what they're selling makes it possible to move products in this category into more people’s hands.