A cleaner, more primal approach to jerky

What started as a hobby that almost put Jason Burke in the doghouse, is now a celebrated brand of paleo-friendly jerky.

New Primal is almost six years old, and growing steadily, standing apart the rest of the nitrate and preservative packed factory-farm jerky brand. Grass-fed jerky with less junk (salt and sugar) is almost untenable, but certainly not impossible. Burke took some time from touting his jerky products nationwide to discuss the travails of making a more pure product and just what “New Primal” means.

Jason Burke, New Primal founder.

Can you touch on the New Primal origin story? How did it all begin?

My favorite story to tell. The team makes fun of me often for it. It started on my kitchen countertop, I’d say 2010. I discovered this new way of eating called “paleo.” I joined a gym and was really about nutrition—I don’t want to call it a diet—this paleo lifestyle I was introduced to. I was working in software sales and was looking for a better desk snack.

Jerky made a lot of sense but I quickly realized that there’s a bunch of sugar in it, and I was looking to reduce sugar. So I googled “how to make beef jerky” and watched Youtube videos, read a few tutorials, bought a little $40 Target tabletop dehydrator. After that, I would take it to work in a little Ziploc bag and people were always asking to try it.

Eventually people started leaving money on my desk, and asked me, “Next time you make some, make me a batch.” So I went out and bought more dehydrators. One grew to six over the next few months. Then I had a discussion with my wife, who went out on a girl’s night out, came home and basically said, “Get these dehydrators out of my house.” Her friends kept telling her that she smelled like smoke, or like she just came back from a barbecue. That was sort of our tipping point. Maybe we’re onto something, maybe we have an opportunity here.

What happened next?

I started researching all the regulatory side of it, all the FDA guidlines in making a product like that. I started renting out a 250 sq. foot catering space to work with. Set up a really terrible website. And people started buying it online. It was sort of an “if you build it, they will come” sort of thing. I was actually kind of surprised people came onto the website—a shady looking one at that. And that went on for about two years. I had this sort of this little “side-gig” where I learned the back end on how to make jerky more than anything else.

September of 2012 I gave my two weeks notice at my day job and October 2012 I hit the streets of Charleston with a backpack full of jerky going kind of store to store, asking little cafes and local shops to carry my item. Not quite four years later, we sit here today and we’re nationally distributed with over 4,000 locations across the U.S., and a full time staff of six people. We’re having a lot of fun.

Your food philosophy paints sort of a picture of health for New Primal when it’s stacked up against similar products on the market. What sets New Primal apart from say, a Slim Jim or a bag of gas station Beef Jerky?

That’s an easy one! First and foremost, the biggest thing that sets us apart comes down to our sourcing. All of our meat comes from pasture-raised, free-range animals who consume diets that are native to them. Cows that eat only grass their entire life. It’s what they’re supposed to eat. Most of the stuff you find at a gas station or a mass produced commercial product, they’re made with cattle that are really confined to feed lots, that are fed a steady diet of corn and soy to fatten them up quickly, injected with hormones, given a steady diet of antibiotics.

Living off corn and being in a cramped space they get sick a lot. So the biggest difference for us is all the meat we use is made from animals who are treated with respect, given a steady diet and are never given hormones or antibiotics. It’s a high integrity meat.

Secondly, there are no preservatives, nitrates or nitrites in our product. We have 50 percent of the sodium cap in our products and I think you’ll find the lowest sugar content on any of the jerkies on the market right now.

To that effect, making a cleaner jerky is—I imagine—difficult to produce on a large scale. What are some of the challenges when it comes to making New Primal.

Just price. It’s a lot more expensive to do it the way we do it. If you add a lot of cheap ingredients on the marinade side—sugar, salt and other preservatives it increases your yield weight. Certainly, animals that are raised the right way cost more. While the demand is growing exponentially in the last seven, eight years it takes about a year longer to raise those animals. Fortunately there are parts of the world that never converted to the feedlot system we have in the U.S.—New Zealand, Australia, portions of South America, they have pretty big portions dedicated to grass-fed operations. We haven’t run into major supply constraints, but it does cost more to purchase the meat and ship it from places that are far away.

New Primal. Can you explain where the catchy name came from?

Initially, we sort of played around with it. No one really knew the word paleo when we first started. Over the last few years since we started, paleo has been one of highest searched terms on Google. And we were trying to find a way to use that word in our product, but I didn’t want to pigeon hole it. At one point I played around with opening a health food store, and producing a line of products for that. And the health food store was going to be called “The Happy Apple.” I’m certain we still have the rights to that name. But we kept coming back to the term primal, sort of in a way to eat like our ancestors would have or as close to that as possible. Obviously the most primal thing you can do is to go out, hunt your food and cook it over fire. But we just don’t do that today in our modern society. So this is the new way to eat primal.

The upcoming New Primal line, coming Summer 2016.

It’s certainly aimed for people on paleo diets but is there another demographic flocking to New Primal?

We find that health-conscious women who are looking to consume more protein tend to lean towards our product because it’s not too salty, it’s not too sugary, it’s not full of junk, it’s just pure protein. We’ve attracted a lot of women and kids, believe it or not. Parents looking to give their kids more protein. There are a lot of crackers and dried fruit and different things like that that kids munch on but there really aren’t any great protein options for kids. And our product is clean which is an added bonus.

Whether someone is paleo or not, whether they follow the gluten free thing or have celiac or have an intolerance to soy, these are all things that aren’t in our product. It’s an opportunity to open up the market to people who have allergens to stuff typically found in jerky.

What flavor profiles are you guys playing with right now?

We’ve been really, really selective in what we’ve launched and we’ve been slow to launch new products. We’ve got three traditional jerky products on the market and three meat sticks. Each of them have the same flavor profile. We have an original, a spicy beef and a turkey. When we started we didn’t want to get that creative, because we wanted to get the initial base flavor, the traditional jerky experience down.

That said, we do have four different flavors that are launching in the summertime. On the meat stick side, we have a habanero pineapple beef, a cilantro lime turkey, a maple and bacon pork stick and a barbecue pork stick. We’re really comfortable with our core line in place and now we’ve decided to sort of branch out with some more innovative flavors.

Any big happenings on the horizon for New Primal?

We’re launching a line dedicated to kids, “Snackmate.” It’ll be released simultaneously with our new flavor line and packaged and marketed for kids. Mom won’t have to share hers anymore.

While we made tweaks along the way, we’re going to hire more people on our team to support our growth.

Any big pie in the sky hopes for New Primal?

Always. I think for us the goal was to have a company that is really resonating with consumers, let’s launch this for real and get out there. The goal was to disrupt the space and really get out there—take the gas station out of jerky products. And we’ve made a ton of headway in the national space, but I would really love to see New Primal to be a brand as big as Jack Link’s. When people think of jerky, they think of a preservative ridden product. We want to change that, go back to the roots of how our ancestors saw jerky.

Jaime Carrillo

Jaime Carrillo dreams of pizza the way Jiro dreams of sushi. Despite his pretensions about food, his pantry stocked with home made jams and pickles and mad scientist ingredients like xantham gum, he’s not above a weekly dose of drive-thru chili dogs. He’s always thinking of different kinds of food to sous vide, or trying his hands at home charcuterie. Also, he’s very excitable and quick to anger when it comes to food and foodie culture.

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