Two Million Meat Sticks a Day Isn’t Enough for Chomps’ CEO

The chief executive officer of Chomps—the wildly popular US meat snack brand—has been trying to cap his kids at two sticks a day. Rashid Ali, 44, set the same goal for himself, but it’s a hard promise to keep when your office is full of them. (Job postings at the snacking startup dangle benefits such as paid parental leave, unlimited time off and “enough meat sticks that if you wanted to eat your body weight in them you could.”) But while high-protein bites line the Chomps office in Chicago’s hip Fulton Market District—fittingly, the city’s historical meatpacking hub—most of its employees are conspicuously MIA. Why? Ali’s sales and strategy teams are spending three days at what he calls “Meat School,” a Chomps-designed course on meat-stick manufacturing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, learning exactly why Chomps “is a very hard product to make.”

Understanding how the sausage is made will come in handy: The actual production of Chomps (not their distribution or marketing or anything else) is the company’s No. 1 priority in the next few years. It churns out 2 million of the individually wrapped sticks a day on average, but that’s not even close to fulfilling the demand from US consumers currently obsessed with on-the-go protein. Chomps can fill only about 84% of orders; it’s been forced to delay shelf-stocking requests from many retailers, including convenience stores, which sell more than twice as many dried meat snacks as grocery stores, according to market researcher Circana LLC. Any plans to push into other geographic markets—or even an earlier idea to develop a high-fiber snack—are off the table too until it can get caught up.