Real Protein Is Back: The Meat Stick Craze
After a decade of bars and powders, the protein snack of the moment is... meat.
After a decade of bars and powders, the protein snack of the moment is... meat. Just meat, cut small enough for your pocket.
Everyone has had a disappointing experience with protein bars…
The one that claimed to be "cookie dough" and tasted like sweetened grout. The one that lived in your gym bag for four months because eating it always felt like a chore. Somewhere in a kitchen drawer right now there's half a bar, folded back into its wrapper, waiting for a hunger that never quite justifies it.
No matter how many new flavours were re-invented or textures reformulated, protein bars have always been a bit of a let down. Not quite the sweet treat you really want.
Always the necessary evil on the way to gains and consuming protein on the go. Sure, they did the job. Twenty grams of protein, individually wrapped, no fridge required. Unfortunately as we all started to question the ultra-processed foods we're consuming, the cons of the protein bar very quickly started to outweigh the pros. A bar with seventeen ingredients suddenly looked less like a health food and more like confectionery with a supplement panel.
But what's the alternative? As we said when we covered the whipped cottage cheese wave, the next phase of the protein trend isn't more protein at any cost.
It's protein from food that already looks like food, and that's exactly the trend we're talking about today. Something almost old-fashioned.
Meat. Sticks of it. Salami that lives in a desk drawer. Biltong that doesn't punish your jaw.
All hail the humble meat stick!
The meat stick is more or less what it sounds like. Real meat, properly made, shrunk down into something that travels: beef sticks, snacking salami, biltong.
Proper protein and an ingredients list you can count on one hand, in a wrapper that lives happily in a coat pocket.
And the timing couldn't be better. Protein has well and truly escaped the gym. Everyone from your mum to your dentist is counting grams now, and once everybody wants protein, the question stops being "how much" and becomes "from what".
Meat has the easiest answer in the aisle, with the growth all in individually wrapped sticks: tender, portioned, pocketable. In the US, sticks are growing at three times the rate of jerky, and chicken sticks alone grew 70% in the latest Nielsen numbers.
The GLP-1 craze has quietly helped shape this new market. Smaller appetites plus a need for protein density is basically a job description for a 30g stick letting consumers keep the macros, without needing a chemistry degree to understand the ingredients.
Startups we're watching in this space:
If you want to understand this whole trend in four words, then Ape already nailed the tagline; "The Original Protein Bar".
Whilst they offer lots of products, its their grass-fed beef sticks, that we’re watching here. The beef is regeneratively farmed and British, the sticks are made by proper charcutiers, and they're fermented with honey rather than propped up with preservatives. Ape also set out to fix biltong's oldest crime, the un-chewable pieces that leave your jaw aching, so this is dried meat you can eat like a normal snack rather than a test of character.
APE Nutrition - Beef StickKennies is the freshest name here. Incorporated in August 2025 but growing fast with more than 250 shops stocking the brand already.
Two things stand out. Firstly, Kennies is built by two female founders in a category that has spent decades marketing itself at blokes, and the brand says the quiet part out loud, pitching itself as the brand moving meat snacking away from its pub-snack and into something more desireable. Second, the pork is properly British: salami is a food we've always bought in from the continent, so making one from outdoor-reared British pigs is provenance with a point.
Kennies - Salami SticksAngus Way was started by two university friends who got so fed up with ultra-processed protein snacks that they spent a year researching beef sticks and very nearly started making them in their own kitchen.
Sanity prevailed. They found a Kent producer with two decades of experience instead, and the result is a grass-fed beef stick from the Kentish Weald: 10g of protein, 80 calories, barely any sugar, none of the top 14 allergens. They describe themselves as going up against ultra-processed food and the industry giants behind it, and they're building the whole thing in public on TikTok, which is precisely where this category's customers already live.
Angus Way - Beef StickThe economics
Though the trend is reasonably new in the UK, in the US, Chomps has grown from a $400k side hustle into a brand reportedly closing in on $1bn, shifting around two million meat sticks a day. American dried meat snacks hit $6.7bn in the past year, up 11.8%. Double-digit growth in food is vanishingly rare.
Why we love this trend
- It's a rejection story: The category isn't growing because people discovered protein. It's growing because they went off the bar. When shoppers reverse on a format they bought loyally for a decade, whole aisles get rebuilt, and rebuilt aisles are where new brands get in.
- The UK white space is glaring: America has a category leader nearing $1bn. Britain has a handful of small, founder-led brands and no breakout. And the one thing the US giants can't ship over here is provenance: grass-fed, outdoor-reared, regenerative, from named British farms. That's the moat.
- The product reads as value, not a treat: In a cost-conscious market, a nutrient-dense 30g stick registers as sensible money rather than indulgence. Snacks that survive a spending squeeze are the ones retailers keep listing.