Country Archer’s Eugene Kang grew up stocking shelves at his parents’ gas station convenience stores. Now he’s producing one of the fastest-growing better-for-you snack foods in America.
By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff
The tang of vinegar and soy sauce laced with the pungent scent of raw beef hits immediately as Eugene Kang, CEO of Country Archer, steps into his jerky factory in San Bernardino, California. Slabs of five-pound rounds get injected via 100 needles with a mango and habanero marinade—and, after soaking it all in overnight, the meat then moves into low-and-slow ovens. All told, Country Archer produces about 22,000 pounds of jerky a day, or some 500,000 pounds each month, from this facility.
“We’ve been really focused. We keep our heads down,” says the 35-year-old Kang, a member of the Under 30 class of 2019. “We don’t really pump our chests a lot.”
Although he has plenty to be pumped about. More than 13 years after he purchased Country Archer for $500,000, the brand has become the fifth-largest jerky company in America, the sole better-for-you option—made with grass-fed meat, little sugar and no antibiotics—among historic brands such as Jack Links and Slim Jim.
With more than $100 million in annual revenue, Country Archer is now at a crucial inflection point. In the food industry, when a company reaches the nine-figure mark it is typically acquired or goes public. Since Kang’s jerky business grew 49% last year, the company is a prime target. But Country Archer is still growing—and quickly gaining on its next-biggest competitor, Oregon-based Tillamook Country Smoker, with $140 million in annual sales. Tillamook, which was owned by three families until private equity firm Insignia Capital Group acquired it in 2017, is profitable and may soon be on the market for its next change of hands. Kang’s two biggest competitors are giants—Wisconsin-based Jack Links, with $1 billion in estimated annual revenue, and Slim Jim with an estimated $500 million.
As Kang takes on the $4.5 billion industry—in which seven in ten Americans made a meat snack purchase in the past year—he’s focused on building an authentic and healthier brand that can hold up for decades to come. “My dream is to see Country Archer products in every convenience store,” he says plainly.
But Kang will need a lot of cash to take on deep-pocketed brands like Slim Jim, owned by $12 billion food giant ConAgra. At least Country Archer is capital efficient and profitable—with as much as $30 million in annual profits estimated.
“We have a lot of degrees of freedom with that,” Kang says. That freedom includes using profits to self-fund the construction of 6,000 square feet more production space this year at the 72,000-square-foot San Bernardino plant, leased since 2020.
The son of a South Korean immigrant who ran gas stations in the desert of Southern California, Kang has been a student of the jerky industry since he was stocking his family’s stores as a kid. He and his business partner—his aunt Susan—share 50% ownership of Country Archer. The rest is owned by a private equity investor, Monogram Capital, which started backing Country Archer five years into Kang’s tenure in 2016. Monogram has invested some $30 million over the past seven years. Country Archer doesn’t have to raise again and Forbes estimates the company is conservatively worth at least $300 million.
Given the steady revenue growth, a sale could be in Country Archer’s future. An company such as privately held $50 billion food giant Mars—which is betting its future on healthy snacking as it moves away from the candy business—could make sense. Kang says there’s no pressure to sell, but he would consider it if a deal could keep growing Country Archer. Last year, Monogram sold its other jerky investment, a manufacturer in Missouri that makes Country Archer’s sticks and runaway hit ministicks, as well as sticks for competitors.
“How big can it be? This brand presents to me—and even the way they both started, with a major Starbucks partnership— it’s very similar to Kind,” says Monogram cofounder and partner Jared Stein, referencing the snack bar brand, which Mars acquired a majority stake in for $5 billion in 2020. “[Country Archer] is elevated. It’s premium. It’s innovative. But it’s approachable. It has tremendous runway ahead of it to grow into a house of brands across the snack space, that are all protein-led.”
And the brand has been a bright spot in the jerky sector—which is otherwise struggling. Sales of jerky dropped more than 4% in the past year, as grocery buyers are ordering less than previous years. But Country Archer’s jerky and meat sticks are the fastest-growing and have even drawn in some customers away from other snacks—of the new consumers eating jerky, some 16% come from chips, 12% of protein bars, and 9% of seed, nut and trail mixes shoppers, according to grocery sales data.
Customers at retailers, including Harris Teeter, Wegmans, Sprouts, Ahold Delhaize and Albertson’s, are flocking to Country Archer’s grass-fed and zero-sugar jerkies, alongside non-traditional retailers such as AMC movie theaters, REI, and hotels brands such as Hilton and Marriott.
“We feel like we have the right infrastructure, the right brand, the right positioning, the right portfolio of products. We really tapped into this unmet consumer needs,” says Kang. “There’s an emerging consumer within even meat snacks today that wasn’t there even four or five years ago.”
In 1981, Kang’s father, William, immigrated from South Korea to California, and the next year, at 18 years old, he convinced the owner of the gas station in the small town of Palmdale where he worked to lease him the store. If he made a profit, he could keep it. He ended up earning $25,000 and used the funds to buy his own store. He purchased three more over the years—giving young Eugene an early education on how a low-margin, family-owned business runs.
That time in his father’s stores taught Kang that investor acquisitions dominate the food and beverage industry and that those deals dictate what is available in stores.
“I remember one day I’m stocking the stores with Propel and next thing you know it’s Gatorade,” he recalls, referencing PepsiCo’s deal to spend $13 billion to acquire Gatorade and its parent company Quaker Oats in 2001. “You could see that change in real time. I’ve always been fascinated just seeing brands come and go.”
He even stocked the jerkies of what are now his top competitors—because they had been around for decades. He loved eating those snacks as a kid and on his shifts, but his parents scolded him they were so expensive. Kang recalls his mom would often say: “Put that down. It’s not free. Don’t eat it. That’s our profit for the day.”
That childhood love of jerky turned into a life-changing aha moment during a trip to the Grand Canyon in his early twenties. At a roadside stand, Kang discovered jerky being sold by a butcher named Celestino “Charlie” Mirarchi. He had a tiny San Bernardino-based business that made artisanal jerky for the roadside farm stands along Southern California’s road-trip-frequented-highways. It was the “most amazingly delicious jerky” he had ever tasted.
The treat was so delicious that Kang left college to create a full-blown business out of it. In 2011, along with his aunt Susan, who had grown up helping her immigrant father sell jerky door-to-door to independent cash-and-carry stores around southern California, bought out Mirarchi, who was 77 and whose children who weren’t interested in the family business, which had around $360,000 in annual sales. Through a small business loan, they paid $500,000.
The company didn’t have a name at the time, but Country Archer was printed on the side of the 2,000-square-foot building in San Bernardino where Mirarchi’s 10 employees sliced the jerky by hand. That’s how Kang settled on the name. To learn the craft, he then spent a year apprenticing with Mirarchi, who died two years later—just as he was figuring out how to properly mechanize producing the flavor-forward jerky.
“What you’re seeing here is a culmination of 13 years of trial and error,” Kang says as he passes the conveyor belt where the meat gets automatically sliced into thin strips ready to bake.
Country Archer launched at the perfect time—high-end jerky brand Krave had just sold for $300 million to Hershey’s in 2015, followed by General Mills spending $100 million on bar and bone broth brand Epic Provisions, known for sourcing grass-fed bison.
Kang almost got swept up in the boom cycle hype. But his father brought him back to reality. Once while explaining to his dad that one of his competitors, Krave, had been acquired for such a large amount—roughly 6 times revenue—without being profitable, he realized what he was describing made no sense. Kang had told his father, “In this world, you don’t have to be profitable” and his father was confused, “What do you mean? How does it run?”
“It was like I was speaking Mandarin,” he recalls. “For him it was breaking his brain. That principle has always stuck with me. We’re going to operate a business. We’re going to be super responsible, and fiscally sound.”
He was also shrewd about marketing. When the brand launched, Kang took a page out of Red Bull’s playbook—remembering how the new brand tried to curry favor with independent store owners by dropping off a free cooler to store their cans. Kang had a custom rack for his jerkies made to give to stores, which otherwise may not have wanted to take away space from more established brands. “I grew up in that environment. My parents love free stuff,” Kang explains.
That keen understanding of how to be visible to consumers has helped the business soar. When Kang was named to the 2019 30 Under 30 list, Country Archer was sold in 25,000 stores across the U.S., including Starbucks and Whole Foods, and had just launched in Canada. The company was on track to see $35 million in revenue that year.
Many of Kang’s better-for-you jerky competitors have also been struggling—and Country Archer is the strongest left standing. After Krave was floundering at Hershey, its founder bought back the company from the candy conglomerate in 2020 through his food private equity investment firm. But his business continues to stumble, even after Krave acquired Chef’s Cut jerky. Biltong-style jerky maker Stryve has also collapsed. After a blank check public listing in 2021, the unprofitable Stryve is currently trading as a penny stock.
The key to Country Archer’s relatively fast success in spite of tougher times for some of its competitors has been divvying up its business among different kinds of snacks. Its jerkies are now second to its meat sticks, which are made by a contract manufacturer in Missouri and Iowa. “We didn’t admittedly fully appreciate what was going to happen over the next five years,” Kang says of the category growth.
“Over the past decade, Country Archer has transformed the premium meat snacks category from a niche specialty segment into a growth-driving powerhouse,” says Brad Barnhorn, a former board member of Krave from before it sold to Hershey’s, who is now on Country Archer’s board. “Country Archer’s commitment to grass-fed beef, real ingredients, and bold flavors has positioned them at the forefront of healthy snacking.”
Next, Kang wants to upend the jerky industry and create healthier meat snacks. Country Archer’s bison jerky is coming to store shelves soon, and the company is also launching a stick made with an ancestral blend of organs for carnivore eaters who look for ways to better incorporate parts like liver and heart in their diets.
Country Archer’s sales are on track to double this year, and Kang thinks tripling that number is also possible. The true test will come when Country Archer expands more into convenience stores, bodegas, and gas stations like where Kang grew up working alongside his parents. “Gas stations are on the horizon,” says Kang. “We want to truly tackle and explore.”
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