When Jack Link saved his first batch of beef jerky, he was trying to save his business.
It was 1985, and Link was a 40-year-old father of two teenage children living in Minon, Wisconsin. The slaughterhouse he bought from his family in 1978 had just filed for bankruptcy protection. That failure led him to look for a way to support his wife and children and prove that he could turn a small family business into a larger company.
His family owned other local businesses, including a general store that opened in 1885 and a meat packing business that produced a variety of sausages for the store. Link experimented with everything from frying potato chips in a meat-packing facility to making Rice Krispie bars because he believed he could turn his fortunes around with one big innovation, said his son Troy, who was 15 at the time.
After Troy Link went on a hunting trip in northwestern Wisconsin, he brought home several packs of jerky from a convenience store and had his father look up the price tag. Based on his years of experience raising cattle and selling meat in his family’s general store, the elder Link wondered if his family business could produce and sell its own version more cheaply. Today, meat snacks such as beef sticks and steak strips form the core of Link Snacks’ multi-billion dollar global portfolio, spanning eight flagship brands including Jack Link’s, Lorissa’s Organic Snacks and Country Fresh Meat.
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The company is one of the world’s largest players in the meat snack market, which is booming amid the modern protein boom. Nielsen IQ Retail Management estimates that the industry will generate more than $5 billion in brick-and-mortar U.S. sales in 2025, and U.S. sales for the category have increased 42% since 2023, according to market research firm Circana. Link Snacks alone generated more than $1.6 billion in brick-and-mortar retail sales in 2025, according to data collected by Nielsen IQ and shared with CNBC Make It by Link Snacks.
Link Snacks remains privately owned and family-owned. Troy Link, who succeeded his father as CEO of Link Snacks in 2013, said maintaining family control and listening to Jack Link’s desire to experiment helped the company meet challenges effectively. There have been more than a few wildcards for the business in recent years, from consumer trends like healthier snacking to the Trump administration’s tariffs that have raised beef prices around the world.
“We’re always looking at the consumer (research) and always looking at where our customers want to buy our products and what kind of products they want to buy and when,” says Troy Link, now 54.
Although he is no longer CEO, the elder Link has a unique perspective on how the company continues to meet challenges. The 80-year-old founder, who has served as chairman since 2013, says, “We worked hard and it’s a good product.” At Link Snacks, he said, “We created real, high-quality beef jerky,” and with the contributions of employees and local residents around Minon, the business “continued and continued to grow…that’s the way it happened.” ”
Meat, Cheese and Frustrated Sasquatch
Using the family smokehouse and a recipe that Jack Link said came from his great-grandfather, a German-born sausage maker, the Link family began selling packages of beef jerky, sold as “beefsteaks,” at local general stores. It was so popular that it made its way into local grocery and convenience stores. Troy Link said the company was profitable from the beginning.
The company then began acquiring smaller competitors throughout the Midwest, expanding its reach and manufacturing capabilities and allowing its products, such as Original Beef Jerky and shelf-stable snack packs featuring local Wisconsin cheese, to be introduced into more convenience and grocery stores across the country. As the Atkins diet and protein-heavy diets swept the nation in the 1990s, Jack Links grew alongside competitors such as Oberto and Slim Jim Meatsticks, whose flagship jerky had been sold in Safeway stores nationwide since the mid-1960s.
“Everyone wanted to eat meat, but it was a big deal,” Troy Link says. Over the ensuing decades, Link Snacks has been able to ride similar trends, from the Paleo diet of the 2010s to the current protein craze, driven in part by the proliferation of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. By the early 2000s, the business brought in more than $300 million in annual sales, according to Troy Link.
Around that time, the younger Link, who studied business and marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and became president of Link Snacks in 2003, began to put his own stamp on the company. He was committed to pulling off a unique and flashy national marketing campaign to communicate to customers that the family-owned Jack Lynx was more than just “a big American corporate brand,” he says.
Link Snacks worked with Minneapolis-based advertising agency Carmichael Lynch to create an ad campaign with the tagline “Feed your wild side” that features a brash protagonist refueling with meat snacks and facing off against a grumpy but intimidating Sasquatch.
The ad went viral on YouTube a year after the streaming platform launched, and the company began paying for national broadcasts in 2006. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Link Snacks spent $10 million in 2008 to air commercials on national networks including ESPN, Comedy Central and Discovery. In the first two years after the commercial aired nationwide, Jack Link’s annual sales increased by 47 percent, according to the company.
“Double your company…every 10 years”
After becoming CEO, Troy Link took on more risks. In 2014, Linksnax acquired Unilever’s meat snacks business, including the European brands BiFi and Peperami, as well as its manufacturing plant in Ansbach, Germany, for an undisclosed sum. A company spokesperson declined to say how much the acquisition expanded the company’s business. Most recently, Link Snacks built a 412,000 square foot, $450 million manufacturing facility in Perry, Georgia, scheduled to open in 2025.
Troy Link plans to continue opening new facilities and rolling out new product lines around the world to foster continued growth, and “we need to double the size of the company at least every 10 years, and I’d like to be faster than that,” he says.
Finding a path to continued growth for an already large company is a unique challenge, and Link Snacks’ ambitions are already facing obstacles. For example, beef prices hit a record high in 2026, due in part to tariffs on foreign beef imports imposed by the Trump administration.
Troy Link, a prominent supporter of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, told the Milwaukee Business Journal in February 2025 that global economic headwinds, including tariffs, were increasing the company’s costs, resulting in the company’s decision to raise product prices by at least 10% in 2025. More than a year later, Troy Link says that fluctuations in meat prices are nothing new in an industry that relies on “global supply chains.”
Link Snacks also has to fight fierce competition from various rivals. Multinational food processing companies Hormel Foods and Slim Jim’s parent company Conagra Brands have market values of more than $14 billion and $7 billion, respectively. Emerging brands like Chomps and Archer Meat Snacks are gaining market share while touting so-called “clean” ingredients and products that are free of sugar and artificial preservatives.
Troy Link believes his company can compete with these new entrants with a portfolio that includes Lorissa’s, an organic meat snack brand that also sells plant-based products, and Jack Link’s new “clean ingredients” line announced in March. The CEO also said he was confident that his company could weather the industry’s ups and downs, especially given its experience in adapting to evolving customer preferences and the depth and breadth of its portfolio.
Mr. Link has hands-on control over everything from cow to consumer, from sourcing the cows to handling much of the company’s processing and packaging in-house. So if you don’t like something, there’s only one place to look. It’s in the mirror. ”
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