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In 2012, after months of sampling hundreds of jerky sticks in stores across Chicago — and begging friends in other states to mail them their favorite meat snacks — Maldonado and Ali found Chomps’ base recipe at a small corner store six hours away in Greentop, Missouri. 

One of their friends in Missouri had mailed them meat sticks made by Kevin Western, a Greentop local who made the snacks for fun and sold them around town. 

Maldonado and Ali reached out to Western, who agreed to help them develop Chomps’ initial recipe. He also mentioned that his family ran Western Smokehouse, a local smokehouse operator in Greentop, and could help manufacture the products on a larger scale.

“We wanted to use grass-fed beef and remove a lot of ingredients jerky typically uses, like sugar and nitrates, which can create a lot of manufacturing challenges,” says Ali. “A lot of manufacturers didn’t want to deal with those challenges and do the old way of approaching it. But the Westerns were willing to work with us, and together we came up with a recipe that’s similar to the one we still use today.”

Chomps’ main ingredients include grass-fed beef, water, celery powder, sea salt and red pepper.

The co-founders pooled about $6,500 of their own money to fund Chomps’ first production run, design packaging, build a website and run ads on Facebook. 

“I bought a $99 Photoshop Elements subscription and taught myself how to make packaging,” says Maldonado. “It was terrible looking, it had a cowhide print on it.”

In December 2012, Maldonado and Ali started selling Chomps’ first product — the original beef jerky stick — on its website. At launch, the price point was about $2 a stick (now, the sticks cost about $2.49 each).

Much to their surprise, the company started turning a profit “within a month,” says Maldonado, all of which was reinvested into more product and social media marketing. 

At first, Maldonado and Ali had full-time jobs and ran Chomps in their spare time for the first couple of years it was in business.

Maldonado, who moved to Naples, Florida in 2013, worked as a real estate agent throughout his 20s and 30s, while Ali stayed in Chicago and continued consulting. 

“We took turns hand-packing and shipping orders,” says Ali. “I remember working anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week as a consultant, then waking up early in the morning or logging off work at 9 p.m. and immediately switching over to Chomps … looking back, I can’t even believe I was able to do that for as long as I did.”

They didn’t expect Chomps to amount to much more than a side hustle, but, as Maldonado jokes, “Chomps had other plans for us.”

In 2013, Chomps’ first full year in business, the pair sold about $50,000 worth of meat sticks. The following year, their sales doubled to $100,000, and the numbers kept climbing from there. 

Maldonado credits Chomps’ early success with the rising popularity of different diets including paleo, Whole30 and keto, all of which encourage eliminating ultra-processed foods and replacing them with whole foods like fresh vegetables, meat and fish.

He and Ali started marketing Chomps as a low-carb, sugar-free snack that fit these “healthier” lifestyles, even adding language like “Whole 30 approved” on its packaging. 

During its first four years of operation, Chomps sold the snacks directly to consumers through its website, and also to some CrossFit gyms, independent specialty stores and doctor’s offices across the U.S.

Chomps started introducing new flavors in 2013, starting with jalapeno beef. Now, the company offers dozens of spins on the original meat stick, including taco-seasoned beef, pepperoni-seasoned turkey and Italian-seasoned beef.

“A lot of the time, we didn’t even have enough product available on our website because we sold through it so quickly,” says Maldonado. “We’d reach out to people and say, ‘Thank you so much for your purchase. We ran out of product. We’d love to send it to you after if you’ll wait for it. Or we could just refund your money.'”

Once Chomps started selling its sticks in Trader Joe’s, other stores quickly followed, including Whole Foods, Target and Walmart. 

Getting into those retailers has given the business a massive boost: In 2020, Chomps’ retail sales hovered around $45 million, but in 2023, it closed out with nearly $250 million in retail sales.

As Maldonado and Ali will tell it, Chomps’ success can be largely attributed to its commitment to attracting a consumer niche that might feel shut out by its competitors: women. 

“The meat snacks market is very heavily male-dominated, and other companies are hitting younger male customers,” says Maldonado. “But we did a brand study in 2018 and found that over 70% of our customer base is female, which is not something Rashid and I were ready for, or expecting, by any means.” 

Chomps’ strongest demographic, he adds, is women ages 25 to 45, who “really respond” to the snack’s low sugar content and diet certifications.