Mark Ritz

Mark Ritz sells dehydrated meat with two things on the label, meat and salt.

Brad Banyas had already tried the product at a party before the two of them properly met, and came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast having worked through five or six cuts. Ritz was about two and a half years in at that point. The conversation started where conversations about Carnivore Snax tend to start, with people reaching for a comparison. Meat pastry is one attempt. Potato chip is the other. Ritz says the texture is the thing that separates it from everything else in the category.

It is dehydrated and prepared much the way jerky is, and comes out nothing like it. Airy, crisp, built on the fattier cuts, because the intramuscular fat is what makes it collapse in the mouth. The rest of the aisle, including the cleaner versions and the biltong, runs on spices and marinades, usually with sugars and preservatives behind them. Ritz launched into the carnivore community because that was the market already asking for two ingredients, and it has since gone well past it: hunters, hikers, people managing autoimmune conditions, a steady demographic over fifty five, MMA fighters. They make everything in house rather than using co-packers, which most meat snack brands cannot say. He found a 12,000 square foot facility in Columbus and walked in thinking he was overpaying for the space. They have gone from a few employees to more than forty.

Sales were never the problem. People buy it and then they buy it again. The constraint is the cow. Ritz will only source regeneratively raised meat from farms in the United States, and the pool to pick from is small, while it takes about a full pound of meat on average to produce one unit. To keep the farms he buys from profitable he cannot walk in asking only for ribeye, even though ribeye outsells everything on the site. So he launches more products in order to buy more of the animal. That means running a manufacturing business and a direct to consumer business at the same time, on a curve that went from about a million dollars in 2021 to $3.6 million in 2022 to roughly $13 million the year of the episode, which he says has to be managed carefully for exactly that supply reason.

The Hunt membership costs $59 a year and pays 5 percent back as store credit. It exists because the hardest cuts to source live in there, including the full blooded Japanese Wagyu that comes from one farm in Texas in whatever quantity the bi-monthly shipment allows. He learned the membership model over twelve years at Costco. The farms he buys from are named on the website, Joyce Farms in Winston-Salem and Thousand Hills in Clearwater, Minnesota, partly so people can go buy frozen meat straight from them. At trade shows he watches eyes. First bite, a few seconds, then they widen.