CPG Satire
General Mills Enters The Meat Stick Business, A Category Formerly Located Next To The Lottery Tickets
Big Food is moving into the beef stick. The beef stick, long a gas-station fixture, says it is ready for natural grocers and has started using words like "grass-fed."
MINNEAPOLIS—General Mills has entered the meat stick category, bringing one of America's most beloved gas-station snacks out from behind the counter, past the lottery tickets and the phone chargers of uncertain origin, and onto the shelves of Sprouts.
The company's Epic brand launched meat sticks in original beef, wagyu beef, rotisserie chicken and hot honey chicken, sold first through Amazon and Sprouts with a national rollout planned for 2027. Conagra is expanding Slim Jim, and Archer, a younger meat-snack brand, is adding mini sticks and multipacks, as protein snacking grows by double digits.
For the meat stick, the move represents a dramatic change in social standing. "For 40 years I was something you bought because you were at pump 6 and felt you deserved it," said a fictional hot honey chicken stick, through a spokesperson. "Now I am next to a $9 kombucha. Someone called me 'artisanal.' I have never been called anything before."
"The consumer hasn't changed. The consumer still wants a meat stick. The consumer now wants to feel like a forager about it."
Category managers said repositioning the meat stick required a careful rethinking of the shelf. "At the gas station, the planogram was 'near the register, wherever it fits,'" said Odessa Kwarteng, a fictional snacks buyer. "At a natural grocer, we need it at eye level, between the nut butters and the guilt."
Industry analysts expect the premiumization to continue. One forecast, prepared by The Daily SKU on the back of a receipt, projects that by 2028 meat sticks will come with a tasting note card, a farm's name and a QR code showing the cow's favorite field.
Old customers were watchful but supportive. A long-haul driver interviewed at a truck stop in Iowa said he had no problem with the meat stick moving up in the world, so long as it remembered where it came from, which he said was "right here, by the beef jerky, for $1.99."
At press time, a meat stick had been spotted at a wine bar, explaining to a cheese board that it was "basically the same thing."
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Riffing on: General Mills, Archer and Conagra expand meat snacks, FoodNavigator