Calm your mind, one beverage at a time

0:00Welcome back to another episode of The Curious Consumer. I am so excited to be here today with Stacey Hartnett, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Chomps. If you don't know Chomps, you're living under a rock at this point. Chomps is a massive meat stick company and actually has just expanded into an entirely new category. So we're going to be talking about that today. But Stacey, I would love for you to quickly introduce yourself and a little bit about the company. Of course. Hi, Dennis. So thank you so much for having me on. Chomps is a family-founded, mission-driven company just focused on providing real food with high-quality ingredients that are convenient for the modern consumer and how we need to live our lives today.

0:45We have had a lot of success, so we're very proud of expanding into over 50 ,000 doors today and 22 million households. So it's been this phenomenal journey for me. So my background is I started at Chomps seven years ago now as employee 10 and has just continued to be able to grow with the company. You've joined at such an incredible time. I would imagine seeing like the growth in the time that you've been there. The meat stick category has blown up and I would say largely due in part to Chomps. I feel like Chomps really took this category from the niche gas station thing that your dad would pick up on a road trip to something that everyone is bringing in their day-to-day routine.

1:34Could you talk a little bit about that? How do you think Chomps did that? I think it was a category that has a lot of nostalgia involved, but the legacy incumbent brands weren't thinking about the consumer today, the consumer's growing focus on high quality, real ingredient foods and what they were looking for. And the consumer today really wants to understand what they're putting into their body, how it's influencing their life, not today, but the longevity over time, how it's feeding and fueling themselves and other people. And it was highly dominated by men. And so the brand really focused on being accessible to anyone.

2:19Gender neutral, you had this male-dominated category. We didn't set out to be a female brand by any means, but just something that was accessible and also fun and bold and just something to be a true solution in someone's routine. That brought a lot of incremental consumers to the category. I wasn't a meat snack consumer before I found out about Chomps. It just wasn't on my grocery list. And so really understanding what the product is, trying it, it's delicious, and understanding that this is a totally new solution to my routine, to my family's routine, has really driven a lot of that success.

3:01And now, as you said, because of all this incremental growth to the category, there's just been like an explosion of so many brands that have done something similar to the stage that Chomps has set of this more gender neutral branding and getting more people into the category. But Chomps still remains on top in a lot of ways and still remains one of the biggest innovators in the category. So I want to talk a little bit about that today because while beef meat sticks have really taken off, Chomps just last month launched chicken sticks. And I want to hear a little bit more about that launch. Why was now the time to get into chicken?

3:39The simplest way to say it is that Americans already love chicken, and it was highly underrepresented in the meat snack category. So the average American consumes about 100 pounds of protein a year, and it was 1 % of our category. So really, I think it's a pretty clear white space. I think that happens for a few different reasons. It's incredibly hard to make. And so I won't go into the food science aspect of it, but it was something that our founders had passion around up to, I mean, 12 years ago. This is a 12 year in the making product. It was particularly hard to make upholding our promise to our consumers of not adding sugar, not taking shortcuts in the production, not adding artificial ingredients.

4:29It was a labor of love figuring that out. Along with the category incumbents, there's still a little bit of a nick factor in meat, right? And so in meat sticks, the approachability, the familiarity, the lightness of chicken is just something that we continue to think is going to be familiar for our consumer to now bring into a portable format for them. So wild that it took so long to formula. I know you don't want to get into the food science, but like what, it just like in short, I guess, what are some of the attributes that make it a more challenging protein to work with? It's moisture levels.

5:06It's all of that within kind of the cooking process. And then to be able to do that and deliver that in a shelf stable format without all of the ick and the added things into it, just added to some of the complexities. Very interesting. There's something really interesting about the timing of this because obviously protein, I don't need to say this, our listeners know, everybody knows protein is everything right now. With that, I actually think a lot more consumers are turning to beef than they have historically, there has been a big shift. I know the carnivore diet got more popular in the past few years and beef as a protein source has become more popular in a lot of ways recently.

5:48So it's really interesting to see this pushback from the other end of like, well, there's still this other protein here. What did the consumer demand look like that informed this innovation? We do have turkey as a poultry option today, but what we were seeing and what we're still seeing from consumers is balance in the protein that they're eating. And so what this also allows is for consumers to enjoy our product if they're not having red meat every day, or if there's restriction in their diet, just gives more versatility, different nutritional benefits within the different proteins. And so you're seeing more balance.

6:26And then chicken also allows us to go into a new occasion. And so one of our flavors is a savory breakfast. Thinking about kind of consumer demands, we were seeing consumers like sneak a chomps in the morning and like, oh, I'm so sorry, but I'm like going to have it in the morning. And so we really wanted to give consumers permission to do that into a new day part. And just the lightness and the approachability of the chicken protein overall. made perfect sense for that morning vacation. I do feel like I cringe at the idea of someone eating a meat stick at 9am, but I'm like, oh, a chicken sausage is part of your breakfast.

7:04There's something about, I don't know why it is perceived that way, but it is. And that is such a smart consumption occasion to tap into if you were already seeing consumers, as you said, like sneaking it in, especially as an on the go option, because I do find like at least anecdotally, a lot of consumers are eating these on the go protein products in the morning because that's when they're in a rush. And we've been told so many times to have a high protein breakfast. So really interesting to see you pivot into that use case. I feel like there's this interesting unsaid battle of the proteins.

7:38Maybe this is Chick-fil-A has done this to me with their classic campaign of the cow being like, eat more chicken. And I'm curious how Chomps is thinking about both of these product lines existing at the same time and one not cannibalizing the other or not polarizing consumers into feeling one way about one set of products or the other. I'm curious like how you're thinking about these two lines coexisting when there is that protein battle in some ways. It's when we have a hypothesis around. I think we have to launch and really just learn from consumers how they're going to respond and react. As much as we're looking at performance every single day, we still remind ourselves, okay, we have to wait, let the consumer tell us how they're going to naturally integrate it into their routines.

8:22We assume some level of cannibalization. With our product, we see a lot of pantry stocking and you have your staples, but a lot of consumers look for versatility and just fun in snacking. It's just, it's not so serious. And so healthy products, being able to just try and change it up and switch it out is interesting for us. So we thought a lot about that in the flavors we were also bringing compared to our existing portfolio is how do we give them something new? and then chicken also just takes on flavor very differently than beef so it's allowing us to tap into a lot of different flavor profiles than that we weren't able to do in beef so one of ours is Nashville hot a lot of consumers have been loving that like heat that fun that flavor that lightness so it's in product development and flavor and variety really is where we see it playing a role We have our trial pack, which we have two of each flavor just to allow people to sample.

9:27It's like 4X'd a very ambitious forecast. Like people are really excited to try all of them and then they'll find their favorite and come back and stock up. I would imagine that it would absolutely kill it at launch, especially with the variety pack, because as you said, like a huge point of differentiation for chicken is these new flavor profiles. So when they're already so loyal to this brand for their everyday meat stick, they're probably really excited to see some new innovation from the same brand and know that it's the same values, even if it's a different protein source. I just love that concept in general of like, we're not just taking a different protein and like slapping all the same principles onto it.

10:09It's no, this is going to be not only different flavors, but also a different use case occasion. I'm interested too, like how you see chicken particularly fitting into just different consumer trends. Obviously we mentioned protein, duh, clean ingredients, but there's, there's been a lot of conversation around like how GLP ones are impacting this space. And I'm interested if there were certain consumers or certain trends that you think apply to chicken a little bit better, even than they might've applied to beef. With chicken, I think it is a continued understanding of the nutrition profile, the macros on it are insane.

10:45I mean, it's 12 grams of protein, 80 calories and zero sugar. And can you, how does that stack up to beef? It's slightly different. So 10 grams in beef that just continues to be, I think a macro trend of protein in consumers every day. You mentioned GLP. We've seen that as a macro trend happening where it comes into our product portfolio and our category in a big way. I feel like we don't give this item enough love, but we also launched this month a chili lime flavor with Walmart. Chili lime beef was, one, it's delicious, but it's our first citrus flavor profile. And one of the insights that we learned from GLP-1 is that consumers kind of seek out acidity.

11:33If you're on GLP-1, that citrus acidity flavor is something that consumers may crave as part of that GLP-1 kind of response and balance in food. That insight was a little nudge for us to really solidify trying that flavor out as well. I had no idea, actually, that that is like a flavor profile that consumers are seeking out on GLP-1. Really cool to see this launch happen in real time, pretty much, because it's still launching and we're still seeing some of the waves of the chicken launch. Our listeners know that I don't eat meat products, but I am a big fan of Chomps and everything you guys have done for this category and cleaning up the category, making it more approachable and more of a lifestyle brand than Meat Sticks had ever been.

12:17Really grateful to have you on. I know so many of our listeners are Chomps fans themselves, so this must have been really cool. And if they didn't know about chicken yet, now they do. And where else can our listeners find Chomps? For now, go to chomps.com and Target. And then starting next month, you're going to see this rollout to a lot of other retailers. And so you'll be able to find it in your store pretty soon. Amazing. Thank you so much, Stacey. This was wonderful.

12:43Stacey Hartnett:Welcome back to another episode of The Curious Consumer. Welcome back. It feels like it's been a minute. It's been a minute. We missed a week, right? We missed a week. We missed a week when we were in Austin. Doing an offsite. It was very fun. We learned a lot about ourselves. We learned a lot about the business. And we have a lot of changes coming. And we do have a Google form for feedback, which we would really love for everybody to fill out. We'll include it in the show notes. We would love to get your thoughts on what you think about Express Checkout and where do you think it should go? Well, the form specifically actually is about the podcast.

13:21So if you are currently listening to this, I'm sure you have some thoughts about how you wish this sounded instead, what you wish we were talking about. One of the biggest questions we have, and I'll just spoiler it because if you even just email us, that would be amazing. You don't have to fill out the form. We're really curious if people are more interested in hearing roundups of every news item the way that we've been doing on the podcast, or if you would prefer more of one deep dive on a larger story and we bring in experts to talk about that story and we've researched it a little bit more.

13:55So it's really this idea of a lineup of many topics that we kind of yap about, which is what we're doing right now versus a deep dive into one topic. We're very curious what you think about that. We're leaning towards the deep dive on one topic because we have so many awesome people in our network who are experts on a range of subjects and we think it'd be really interesting. So we'd love to hear your thoughts. All that being said, we're very excited to get into a week of a lot of news. If you feel like you missed out on having an episode of Curious Consumer last week and want to know what the news was, we will link our newsletter edition below where you can catch up on all the news from last week.

14:37But this week, We are kicking things off with something I have been observing lately that two news stories this week really sparked me to write about. And that thing is L-theanine. L-theanine, if you're unaware, is an amino acid. It's a non-protein amino acid. And it's found naturally in the tea plant. Which also, fun fact, there's only one kind of tea plant. different teas are just made by processing the tea plant differently or growing that tea plant in different regions, but it's all the same tea plant, which is Camellia sinensis. But L-theanine is found naturally. It's an amino acid found naturally in tea plant.

15:22And you might be most familiar with it because L-theanine is often found now in a lot of supplements. It's also found now in a lot of beverages. And so we were interested mostly in this week is this pairing that I've been seeing a ton of caffeine with L-theanine into these productivity beverages.

15:46Stacey Hartnett:So two stories that got this story kicked off was Pepsi's iced tea brand, Pure Leaf. They launched their first ever functional sparkling line, Mental Focus, with around 70 milligrams of caffeine and added L-theanine. These are the two main call outs on the package. They come in two flavors. And then this same week, a creator founded brand called New Tonic. It's a productivity drink. They raised $6 million at a$60 million valuation on the back of their L-theanine and caffeine stack. Those were the two big headlines from this week, which also is interesting because one of those is PepsiCo, which is a massive brand betting on this combination of L-theanine and caffeine.

16:32And another one is a startup, which is betting on this combination of L-theanine and caffeine. But we've also seen a recent string of many more of this same combination. So Neuro is an energy gum and mint brand built on the same combination. They just returned to Shark Tank last month. They became the first company in the show history, actually, to come back after rejecting a deal and then secured an investment with Daniel Lebotsky from Kind, which is incredible. And last week, we also got samples of this new product called Lamb Beverages, which is L-theanine coffee syrup. So it's not a caffeine and L-theanine product, but the idea is you add your L-theanine coffee syrup to your coffee.

17:16So that creates this combination. And so we're seeing all this happening. And I was like, where did this, where did this come from? What's going on? So as I said, L-theanine has, was discovered a long time ago in the tea plant. It was originally described anecdotally as this, this feeling that people had when they drink green tea, which is like this alertness that isn't jittery as opposed to coffee. So then in the eighties and nineties, science has started studying it and they were able to link L-theanine to alpha brainwave activity that showed it actually counteracted some of caffeine's stimulant edge.

17:53By the 90s, a Japanese ingredient supplier was able to mimic the enzymatic process that naturally produces L-theanine in the tea plant. So it was able to be used as a standalone ingredient and supplement. That ingredient that was made by this Japanese scientist is called suntheanine. That's the brand. And it's still the dominant form on almost every label of a supplement or beverage or whatever product that adds L-theanine. So that's why it's such a monopoly on this ingredient. So clearly this isn't all that new. And actually, something you found was this article from 2009 showing how L-theanine was supposed to be the big, cool ingredient back then.

18:36Stacey Hartnett:Right. I mean, speaking of PepsiCo, Gatorade. Gatorade came out with a focus line alongside the iconic infamous infamous now Tiger Woods the the golfer sobe water which my god do I miss that drink they had a focus line there was there was some other waters but this article from 2009 like it was titled the new new beverages with L-theanine come into focus. Focus and concentration has been a point of discussion in beverages for a long time. So like a lot of trends, like a lot of ingredients, this wasn't really new. But the biggest thing that we've sort of uncovered is the market was not ready for that yet.

19:27Stacey Hartnett:The ingredient was consumers weren't. It was too niche. Just saying this will help you focus or this has L-theanine in it is meaningless to the average consumer. L-theanine then after trying to have these beverage launches that focused on the focus element, that didn't really land. So L-theanine was relegated to, as I said, this like sleep supplement side, because it's much easier to think as a consumer of the idea of this helps me calm down. That's something that we're told happens with magnesium or melatonin or chamomile. And so L-theanine was just added into that bucket because it's a much simpler concept than this idea of like focused alertness, which is obviously oxymoronic.

20:07Like it's a bit, it's a harder, it's a harder thing to understand. So it was relegated just to these sleep supplements. And a lot of really well-known sleep supplements built their sleep stack on L-theanine. And it shouldn't have been able to make its way out of the sleep aisle, in my opinion. Once something is in the sleep aisle, being able to have consumers then shift their understanding to this isn't going to make me sleepy. This is going to help me with my focus and alertness is a really large challenge. I don't think there's any single brand that could have done that on their own. PepsiCo has all the money in the world.

20:38Gatorade had all the money in the world. Their Tiger Woods collaboration flopped. What I think was the differentiating factor that made the market ready is matcha. So we're here in 2026. Matcha has been skyrocketing over the past two years. In the shortest time, it went from this niche Japanese ritual to a fully mainstream beverage. You can find it at Jack in the Box. That blew my mind. I knew Dunkin' and Starbucks. It's so random. I know. I knew Dunkin' and Starbucks had matcha, but then I was looking into other quick service retailers that had matcha on their menu. And if Jack in the Box has it on their menu, it's officially ubiquitous.

21:20So matcha is everywhere now. And what matcha did is because it naturally contains L-theanine as a shade grown tea, it gave consumers an understanding of when I drink matcha, I have this feeling that's different than when I drink coffee. I feel alert, but not anxious. I feel alert, but not jittery. And once they could identify that feeling, it became a lot easier for people to add L-theanine to other products and have consumers understand this is how you feel when you have a matcha.

21:50Stacey Hartnett:Right, exactly. And the other side of that too is you pair that consumer understanding from the matcha with this just broader wellness trend of people generally understanding and desiring new types of ingredients and new types of functions that make them feel a certain way that isn't necessarily strictly from a pharmacy. It leans into these brands being able to launch and already have the education component down. People know that makes them feel good, or at least they trust that the brand says, focus, great. I want focus. I need something more than just a cup of coffee or an energy drink. I definitely think alongside the magnesium and the the protein, this will be a very prominent ingredient in a lot more products going forward.

22:42Absolutely. And consumers, it's, it's, as you said, it's also this wellness narrative because consumers understand now that they can have more control over the effect that certain products that they intake have on their body. So what I mean by that is like, I think in the past we just accepted I'll have a coffee and I'll be jittery and that's just that and now there are all of these different alternatives out there to yes coffee but so many other supplements that have given consumers this sense of control I don't have to accept that I won't get enough protein in my diet if I but if I'm vegetarian I don't have to accept that I won't get enough fiber in my diet if I'm focusing on protein supplements have taught consumers or today's supplement culture has taught consumers that there's always a way to get the outcome that you want from packaged products.

23:31And so now they're like, well, I don't like the problem that I feel jittery from caffeine. So there must be a supplement to fix that. And lo and behold, there is. So I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more innovation with brands putting Altheanine into their caffeine products. We'll also just see Altheanine everywhere. But in general, I think that cult combo of caffeine plus Altheanine is going to become increasingly popular, especially, and we're going to do a deep dive on this, I think, on this new wave that we've been seeing of Adderall alternatives, things marketed as Adderall alternatives, which legally I'm like, are you even allowed to do that?

24:07But point being, there are a lot of new beverage products mostly, or just supplements that are coming out saying that they are like so helpful for focus. You could actually ditch your ADHD medication and use them instead. This is going to be a space where L-theanine will thrive as well and a few other ingredients. So that's another episode that we'll be excited to chat about. Yeah.

24:28Stacey Hartnett:I miss when better living through pharmacology meant actual pharma and not just something I buy at like a Kroger. I know. I know. It's kind of interesting, but it is more accessible. That's a plus. Or more expensive. It depends. If you have insurance, it's more expensive. If you don't have insurance, I'm sure it's significantly cheaper to buy a product than a drug without insurance. But that's all an aside. I think, oh, last thing I want to mention on this story is I just think that the way that Pure Leaf launched their mental focus tea was wild. It's a dual partnership with Jordan Childs, who's the Olympic gold medalist athlete, incredible amazing but usually you like stop there like usually you find a really cool human to partner with and you're like that's all we need no they went one step further and it's also launched in partnership with brick as in the new technology that people have been using it's like this plastic thing that you put on your fridge and it locks you out of your phone so it's a tool that consumers are using um to lock their phones so that they don't go on their phones it's become like this new understanding of digital focus and like, what do people say?

25:50Analog life.

25:51Stacey Hartnett:Oh, yeah. So it's this partnership with like an Olympic athlete and then also a device that gets you off your phone. They're really like trying to rub in the idea of like, this is about being alert like an athlete. And it's also about being focused like somebody who has a brick. Like I, It's really, like, maybe too elaborate. Like, it's like the storytelling, like, doesn't feel cohesive. But I just thought it was interesting. It's very big brand coded. It's very big. They're like, what if we just slap these things together? It's creative-ish, I guess. We'll see what happens. We'll see if people go for it.

26:31They could have just launched a matcha in a can and called it quits.