Meat Trimmings Are a Health Food Now
For most Americans, meat sticks have one face: Macho Man Randy Savage. The pro wrestler fronted the Slim Jim brand for much of the 1990s, flipping tables and crashing through ceilings in television commercials to implore young men to snap into dried sausage rods. Over several decades of marketing, Slim Jim had fine-tuned itself for a certain type of bro: one who delighted in the purposefully trashy masculinity embodied by WWF icons in neon-fringed leather and the mystery-meat gas-station snacks they love. The processed protein cylinders long dominated the meat-snack market, netting hundreds of millions of dollars in sales in the ’90s for the packaged-foods behemoth Conagra.
As the new millennium dawned, however, American tastes and the whims of pop culture started to shift. People began to worry about processed foods and search for different flavors and ingredients in their snacks. Savage’s tenure with Slim Jim ended, and the brand launched new campaigns—most notably, a series of late-2000s ads in which a man dressed as from “Snap into a Slim Jim” to “Made from stuff guys need.” But growing up is hard. By late 2010, sales of the sticks had , and even as they rebounded in the years afterward, over teenage boys aging out of their products.
