The meat stick business is brutal.

The New Primal and Chomps were both founded in 2012 — Jason Burke launched the first, Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali the second, on roughly $6,500 of pooled personal money. Chomps went full-time in 2016 after landing Trader Joe's, which is why that year gets miscredited as the founding.

Neither brand ran a share-stealing playbook. They went after people who were never going to buy jerky under any circumstances — and by Chomps' own account, most of the people they landed had never eaten it.

Ali has separately said roughly two-thirds of Chomps consumers had never tried jerky before. Worth flagging: that figure is an executive's characterisation of the company's own data, not published research — we've left it attributed rather than dressed up as a study.

Archer tells the same story from a different seat, and frames it as a change in who's willing to walk down the aisle at all.

That's not competing. That's market-making. And it worked almost too well — because a category you grow for everybody is a category everybody can enter.

You don't cheat with protein. You hit it. That single verb difference is most of the category's tailwind, because it turns the purchase from restrictive into additive. Nobody buys a meat stick to avoid something. They buy it to add something to a number they're tracking.

The demand is real and it is under-served. In a Chomps-commissioned study with SPINS, consumers said they were seeking protein in 36% of snacking occasions — but only 19% of snack purchases actually fulfilled that need.

On the widely-quoted “86% of Americans want more protein” figure: that comes from a RepData survey of 1,000 adults commissioned by PepsiCo Foods U.S. and first published in the Good Warrior launch release. It is brand research produced to justify a product. The independent benchmark — IFIC's 2025 Food & Health Survey, n=3,000 — puts it at 70%. Use whichever you like, but cite the difference.

The more useful IFIC finding is the one nobody quotes: 79% of Americans don't know or aren't sure how much protein they need. A category selling into a goal its buyers can't quantify is a category where the number on the pack does a lot of work and the label does the rest.

Jack Link's marketing lead describes the demand environment as permanently favourable, which is the kind of thing you only say when you've watched it hold for a decade.

There's a trust inversion underneath it that matters for creative. In a Link Snacks / Talker Research survey of 2,000 Americans, 58% said they trust meat snacks most for health benefits — ahead of shakes (27%) and bars (15%). But asked which is healthiest, bars won at 31%, shakes 28%, meat snacks 24%.

People trust the meat and credit the bar. That's a positioning problem, not a product problem, and it's exactly the sort of thing that gets solved with occasions rather than with another spec on the front of pack.

Here's the cruel arithmetic of market-making. The pioneers spent a decade and a lot of money teaching Americans that a meat stick can be clean, grass-fed, sugar-free and something you'd hand a seven-year-old. That education doesn't stay proprietary. It sits in the consumer's head, and the next brand on the shelf inherits it for free.

Three things happened in the first half of 2026 that make the point better than any argument.

Look at what PepsiCo's spec sheet says: grass-fed and finished, 10g protein, 0g sugar, 100 calories, no artificial colours or flavours. That is, line for line, the challenger brand claim set from 2016. It took a $90-billion company one product launch to acquire it.

And Jack Link's didn't hedge. It went straight at the clean brands with a shorter ingredient list than most of them, then said so out loud.

That second quote is the incumbent's real argument, and it's a good one: the moat isn't the recipe, it's the plant. Link Snacks operates in eleven countries and is building a $450M facility in Perry, Georgia. Over $1 billion of meat-snack processing investment has been announced across the category since 2020.

Meanwhile Conagra's new CEO said the quiet part in July, roughly six weeks into the job:

An ingredient claim is a fact about a product. Anyone with a co-packer and a budget can acquire it, and in 2026 two of the largest food companies on earth did exactly that inside of a fortnight.

An occasion is a habit inside somebody's day. It has a time, a place, a competitive set and a repeat cycle. You can't buy it with a reformulation, because it isn't stored on the pack — it's stored in the buyer.

Chomps' own account of what matters puts the metric where you'd expect if this thesis is right — not on distribution doors, not on velocity, but on whether people come back.

Repeat rate is the occasion, measured. If a stick has a fixed slot in someone's Tuesday, the repeat takes care of itself. If it's a discovery purchase driven by a claim on the front of pack, you're re-buying that customer every single time — and the 119 promotional ads in Chomps' own live set say even the leader is doing plenty of that.

Maldonado made the same point five years ago about what actually separates a real business from a well-funded one, and it has aged extremely well now that private label is growing at 65%.

Whoever owns the most occasions wins. Not whoever has the shortest ingredient list — that race ended in March, and it ended in a tie.