Greenridge Naturals offers cooler meat stick alternative

The producer’s refrigerated meat sticks stand out from shelf-stable counterparts.

Courtesy of Greenridge Naturals

Jerky and meat snacks are increasingly appealing to consumers looking for high-protein, low-carb snacking options. Convenience store shelves, grocery snack aisles, and impulse endcaps near store checkout stands frequently contain a number of alternatives for meat-minded munchers to reach for.

Greenridge Naturals, however, offers a range of meat snacks found in a unique spot for the category: refrigerator cases. While most meat-based snacks currently on the market are stored at ambient temperatures, this company’s products have taken a cooler approach. Mark Falconi, vice president of sales with Greenridge Naturals, checked in with Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery to share a little info about the company and its unique positioning.

On better-for-you snacking

The trends continue to move towards healthy snacking. Meat sticks are the best value for your dollar and the Greenridge snacking products offer a healthy alternative to what is in the marketplace today. Greenridge Naturals operational excellence and our logistics solutions provide us with the opportunity to get our products to the market at the best price points, increase basket ring, keeping shelves full while providing healthier snacking options to shoppers.

There are a few major differences with Greenridge and our competitors:

In addition to being refrigerated, our Meat Sticks are all natural and gluten-free, with no added phosphates, nitrates or nitrites, no soy, no MSG, or added artificial color or flavors. Our products, including the snack sticks, are all hardwood smoked using natural wood chips. We never use liquid smoke. There is nothing in the market that shares all of these same attributes.
Our product is hand-crafted and made with love in our production facilities and never outsourced. We oversee the entire process from smoking to packing to shipment.
We never use frozen meat.

On product innovation

We have launched our 1-oz, 2-oz, and 4-oz refrigerated meat sticks, found nationally at c-stores, grocery, and drug stores. We are launching our new 8-oz and 14-oz Ridge Packs. These are a combination of 1-oz meat sticks and 1-oz cheese sticks in a ready-to-go pouch. These will be ready to ship in September 2024 and have already received exceptional feedback from retailers nationally.

Jenni Spinner is the chief editor of Snack Food and Wholesale with more than 25 years of experience in business-to-business communications. She has written extensively about food production, safety and packaging; pharmaceutical drug development; concrete and masonry construction; and more. She holds a Bachelor’s in Communications from the University of Illinois. Jenni can be reached at spinnerj@bnpmedia.com.

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