In 2011, Maldonado met his future business partner, Rashid Ali, at a friend's apartment in Chicago. After a couple of betting rounds, their conversation turned to guilty pleasures.Sign up for NBC New York newsletters.
Since then, Chomps has grown into a nationwide brand attracting more health-conscious consumers to the $17 billion meat snacks market, selling more than 350 million jerky sticks to date. Maldonado and Ali, 43, have stayed on as Chomps' co-founders and co-CEOs. "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.
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. 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.
"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.'"In 2016, Maldonado and Ali received a phone call that would change their careers — and Chomps' trajectory.
Up to that point, Maldonado says Chomps produced up to 10,000 pounds of meat each month"at most" to fulfill customer orders. But the Trader Joe's order alone required at least 120,000 pounds of meat to be produced within weeks. To help them fulfill that massive order, Maldonado says he and Ali ended up renting additional storage space in Chicago and hiring temp workers to hand inspect the products before shipping them to Trader Joe's.
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.