13 years ago, Rashid Ali and Pete Maldonado started a meat stick company with $6,500 from their own wallets. Today, Chomps is one of the fastest-growing food brands for a second year in a row.
“We’re not necessarily competing with the legacy brands,” Ali, who also serves as CEO, tells me. “Chomps is growing the overall [meat snack] category.” That’s because the brand has thrived in flipping the script of the assumption that meat sticks are a dude snack. Meat snacks as a whole are now on the verge of becoming a $10 billion industry, in part because Chomps has given women permission to chomp too.
The duo’s slow but intentional growth strategy is working, to say the least. According to the company’s internal data, Chomps is now halfway to hitting $1 billion in sales. About half of that growth occurred just in the past year, the vast majority of which were new consumers to the category.