Cattle Calling: “There’s been a lot more people that have come in and failed than people that have come in and succeeded,” says CEO Troy Link (with his father, Jack). “Now we have to produce more revenue with less space.”
NATE RYAN for forbes
Jack Link’s $4 billion family-owned business is the largest manufacturer of jerky in the world, selling 800 million packages of meat snacks and other products a year. But the company namesake and his son are still hungry for more.
Back in 1985, the Link family’s Wisconsin meatpacking business had just gone bankrupt, and Jack Link was taking his then-teenage sons hunting when they stopped at a convenience store to buy a few packages of jerky. After paying, Link couldn’t believe how expensive it was.
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s quite a lot of money,’” Link, now 79 years old, tells Forbes.
The idea stuck with Link, who soon realized that he could make these products himself, and that he even already had ovens in his shutdown plant.
“So we laid some jerky in there and it came out just wonderfully,” Link says in a rare interview. “And that’s where it all began.”
Using his German immigrant great-grandfather’s 1880s recipe, Link’s jerky became a hit, and now as the eponymous brand Jack Link’s, it is the top-selling jerky brand in America. With $2 billion in estimated annual revenue and 34% of the U.S. meat snacks market cornered, the company has made him a billionaire.
“The jerky was there all the time to save me,” says Link, who still lives in the same house in Wisconsin where his children grew up.
Today, Jack Link’s beef sticks and jerkies are sold across more than 200,000 stores at nearly every major retailer in America, as well as in 55 countries around the world. The business manufactures more than 800 million packages of meat products each year.
As the king of the $9 billion (annual sales) global meat snack industry—a hot market that, over the past decade, has attracted an investor-led frenzy of an estimated $1 billion in funding alongside nine-figure acquisitions by large publicly traded companies—Jack Link’s has withstood the challengers, while a few became major flameouts.
Throughout this rise, Jack’s younger son, Troy, now 53, has been navigating the path forward, having been named CEO in 2013 as his father moved into a chairman role. Troy Link says the competition is tough but that there is still plenty of room for growth. “Believe it or not, we still have a lot of opportunity,” says Troy.
Link Snacks is 100% family-owned, and the Links say they have little interest in selling. If the company did get acquired, it wouldn’t come cheap. Says one private equity investor, “it’s a business you would love to own, but you wouldn’t want to buy it based on what the owners think it’s worth.” Forbes estimates the business is conservatively worth $4 billion. Jack Link’s declined to comment on financials.
The business has strong profitability—Forbes estimates that gross profit margins top 30%, thanks in part to higher margins at convenience stores and airport newsstands such as Hudson News—and Forbes estimates that it has some $200 million in EBITDA annually. “We can say no to the easy path,” says Troy. “It keeps priorities really straight, and we can stay focused for the long term.
“And right now with meat costs soaring, we’re able to hold our breath. We’re able to let things settle in,” he continues. “They’re not going to stay this way forever. The question is, how long can we hold our breath and how purple will our face get?”
Jack Link’s has a lot to contend with amid startups growing fast and disrupting shelves—including Chomps, Archer and Fatty Smoked Meat Sticks—but Jack Link’s continues to grow, even at its significant scale.
Says Jack, “it’s the fortitude and staying at it that make it happen.”
When the Links switched from meat packing to jerky-making, Troy had already been working at his family’s Minong, Wisconsin slaughterhouse for a few years, first on the kill floor and then along the de-boning line. “What I learned is you have to continue to reinvent yourself,” he says.
After college at University of Wisconsin-Stout, he returned in 1993 to a company that had become profitable and was still growing. Jack Link’s was a popular Midwestern brand, especially at Holiday and Kwik Trip gas stations, that had yet to break out beyond the region.
What first took the brand nationwide in the early 1990s was marketing its beef sticks with a cheese stick counterpart. Suddenly, as Troy recalls, the family jerky business had “more orders than we could produce.”
With that success, Minong—with a population of around 500—soon became dotted with other Link family businesses, including a car dealership, an RV dealership, a boat dealership, a furniture store, and a grocery store. (The latter three closed a few years ago.) The family has also owned a considerable number of acres of ranch and farmland in the area (and Jack continues to maintain a herd of cattle every year).
While Jack led the business, Troy focused on sales, marketing and procuring ingredients. Troy quickly left a major mark on the business when he realized that Jack Link’s should sell bagged beef jerky. “It really wasn’t a thing,” Troy recalls. “No one thought a $5 item could sell.”
After pitching the idea to his father, Jack had said that the business didn’t have the capital to back such a launch. But Troy drew up plans to keep costs low. He ultimately convinced Jack to launch four flavors in three sizes and Jack Link’s officially became the first to sell jerky in a bag with a resealable pouch in 1997. Sales soared almost immediately soared as Walmart and Target brought on Jack Link’s.
“From the moment we had it, we couldn’t produce enough,” Troy recalls. “We couldn’t keep it on the shelves.”
Feeding Frenzy: Jack Link’s bagged beef jerky line makes up more than 50% of total revenue.
Robert D Brozek / Alamy
Today, Jack Link’s bagged beef jerky line makes up more than 50% of total revenue. But the real win was for the business’s bottom line. Previously, Jack Link’s had sold extremely low-cost items—meat sticks for 50 cents or $1 depending on the size—and suddenly each sale was bringing in several dollars at a time.
All that incremental profit helped secure the financial foundation, as distribution expanded to Costco and Bass Pro Shops and Jack Link’s pushed further beyond the Midwest.
Troy became president in 2003 and the following year, his older brother, Jay, resigned amid several disputes. The Links filed a lawsuit in 2005 to compel Jay to sell his shares, based on a prior agreement, and Jay then filed a countersuit against his father and brother, claiming they breached their fiduciary duty to buy his shares for a discounted price. Both claims eventually went to trial in 2008, and after six weeks in Wisconsin state court, the jury decided that Jay could receive his salary from the day he left the business, but that he had to surrender his shares for the previously determined amount of $19.4 million. The jury also ordered both Jack and his son Jay to each pay $5 million in punitive damages, though Jay’s claim to damages was later slashed by a judge on appeal by more than 80%.
Amid that legal chaos, sales soared in 2005 and continued to accelerate quickly.
When Troy took over as CEO in 2013, the business had just surpassed $1 billion in estimated annual revenue. It also coincided with the meat snacks industry setting off on a rollercoaster ride. In 2015, Hershey’s acquired high-end jerky brand Krave for $240 million, and then General Mills paid an estimated $100 million for grass-fed bison bar brand Epic Provisions. A boom of interest from private equity and venture investors soon followed.
“We’ve got more competitors and better competitors than ever before,” says Troy. “We’ve got some competitors that are very focused on having minimal items, and when you have minimal items, you create great velocities.”
To stay competitive with brands suddenly backed by publicly traded companies and others flush with private capital, Troy pushed the business to get even bigger, acquiring Unilever’s meat snack division and pushing Jack Link’s into Europe.
Jack Link’s sales remained strong, yet Krave floundered at Hershey’s. Krave’s founder Jon Sebastiani bought back the company in 2020 through his private equity investment firm Sonoma Brands and acquired a second jerky line, Chef’s Cut. It took a few years to undo the damage to distribution. But it’s turned around in the past year, especially after Krave, previously only a maker of jerky, launched its first meat stick. Over 2025 Krave and Chef’s Cut increased distribution across a combined 16,000 retail stores, including at Albertsons, Kroger, Costco, Wegmans and H-E-B. Yet another jerky producer, Stryve, which went public through a black check listing in 2021, has nearly imploded. The unprofitable company currently trades as a penny stock.
“There’s been a lot more people that have come in and failed than people that have come in and succeeded,” says Troy. “Now we have to produce more revenue with less space.”
Among the insurgent brands putting pressure on Jack Link’s, there’s Chomps, with $400 million in estimated annual revenue, up nearly 150% year-on-year. Insiders say Chomps could be eyeing going public. Chomps declined to comment on a potential IPO, but claims that more than 22% of the growth in overall meat snack sales nationwide this year was driven by its brand.
There’s also Archer with $300 million in estimated 2025 revenue, up over 60% from last year. Revenue could hit $500 million next year, as some 70% of Archer’s sales come from consumers who haven’t purchased a meat snack before or consumers spending more than before. Says Archer founder and CEO Eugene Kang, a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2019: “Jack Link’s paved the highway and ultimately there’s room for both.”
Archer is backed by Monogram Capital, which also acquired the industry’s preferred meat stick contract manufacturer, Western Smokehouse, which makes the sticks for Archer, Chomps, and Fatty, earlier this year in a deal worth about $500 million (including debt). There are also companies backed by publicly traded ConAgra, which owns legacy brand Slim Jim as well as the more recent acquisitions of Thanasi Foods, maker of Duke’s meat snacks, in 2017 and Sweetwood Smoke & Co., maker of Fatty, in 2024.
Troy says he would like to acquire a few competitor brands himself, but “I keep getting outbid by private equity” he says. Meat snacks, he notes, are “more relevant today than they’ve ever been.” And the sector is still growing. Over the next five years, the industry projects growth of 11% annually. “Everything that you can snack on is a competitor to us,” Troy says.
As part of that philosophy, Jack Link’s wants more Gen Z customers and has invested in making beef and turkey sticks as a collaboration with world’s most-watched YouTuber (and a regular Jack Link’s buyer) Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast. So far, 57% of customers have never purchased a Jack Link’s product before.
Growing Jack Link’s meat sticks line will be crucial to winning over new consumers, especially because it’s a faster-growing category than jerky. To that end, Troy wants Jack Link’s to remain relevant, and earlier this year the business sponsored Nascar’s Talladega Speedway and rebranded the Geico 500 as the Jack Link’s 500. It will have that name until the end of 2027.
Meat sticks are an increasingly important part of Jack Link’s business—so important that the company has invested $450 million (in cash and tax incentives) in building a new 400,000 square feet in Perry, Georgia that opened in this year and is dedicated to manufacturing only sticks of meat and cheese. It can make up to 820,000 sticks a day. The new plant is also close to where Troy lives in Florida, where he splits time between Wisconsin.
Looking ahead, Troy says Jack Link’s will remain family owned. His wife, Lorissa, runs an allergen-free meat snack brand called Lorissa’s Kitchen, inspired by the youngest of their three children who suffers from allergies. Their children could eventually take on roles at Link Snacks.
As for what Jack Link himself hopes the business will look like in another generation or two, he is very clear: “Well, bigger is better.”