How Chomps is pitching meat sticks for breakfast

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There’s a long history of food marketers trying to get consumers to eat what typically are considered breakfast foods long after the rooster stops crowing. Cereal brands have done it for generations through recipe development, with Rice Krispies expanding eating occasions beyond breakfast with its Rice Krispies Treats recipe introduced in 1940 and Chex hitting it out of the park in 1953 with Chex Mix, a non-breakfast recipe that required purchasing multiple varieties.

In the 1970s, a popular Florida Orange Growers campaign featured celebrities drinking orange juice in the PM and delivering the tagline, “It isn’t just for breakfast anymore.”

In food marketing parlance, it’s expanding a food item’s dayparts. Now Chomps, the brand of self-described “better-for-you” meat sticks, is taking the opposite tack. Although its products are not typically breakfast fare, it is introducing a new flavor for when consumers are waking up to Steve Inskeep: Savory Breakfast.

The breakfast product is among three new chicken flavors, the first chicken products for the 14-year-old brand.

“Our founders have been trying to tackle chicken since the beginning,” Stacey Hartnett, SVP of marketing at Chomps, told Retail Brew. (Editor’s note: No chickens were actually tackled for this story.) “Without getting too technical, it’s very difficult to do, and it’s even more difficult to do without the use of sugar.”

Once the formulation challenges were overcome, the plus side of chicken, Hartnett continued, is that it’s “lighter, it holds flavor differently as well—and so that kind of bridges us into the breakfast occasion.”

Stick shift: As the protein craze continues apace, the dried-meat snack category is booming, with its US market size swelling to $6.38 billion in 2025, a YoY increase of 11.3%, according to Circana data. Within the category, non-jerky meat snacks like Chomps both command the lion’s share and grew even more dramatically, with a 2025 market size of $3.92 billion, up 15.5% YoY, per Circana.

While Circana does not release brand-level data, Hartnett told Retail Brew that in 2025 Chomps’s revenues grew 124% YoY.

With its on-packaging tagline, “All stick without the ick,” Chomps has positioned itself as a more wholesome alternative to traditional meat sticks like the original Slim Jim. All Chomps products are free of added nitrates, sugar, and artificial preservatives.

From the start, the brand has trumpeted its nutrition bona fides as a way to attract consumers who hadn’t thought meat snacks were their jam.

The company’s “marketing job” was “How do we first introduce a category that people weren’t considering but they also had maybe some negative feelings about it?” Hartnett said. “We weren’t seeking to convert a Slim Jim buyer, necessarily.”

Chomps continues to win converts to not just its brand but the category; 24% of its shoppers over the last year were new to the category, per the brand.

Business Insider reported recently that while protein-filled foods like meat snacks may have once been associated with “the gym-bro stereotype,” they’re gaining popularity with “muscle mommies”—women seeking to increase their protein intake.

Hartnett said that while women account for 70% of Chomps purchasers, much of that’s for their households, and that “the consumer actually eating the product is more 50-50.”

Dearly dayparted: Along with its other two new chicken varieties, Original Chicken and Nashville Hot, the breakfast meat stick will be rolled out in Target and on Chomps’s DTC e-commerce site.

With the breakfast product, Hartnett said the brand is taking on a different competitive set, namely other high-protein options like yogurt or protein waffles. And, for those not on the protein bandwagon, she added, “in certain households, that option is still grabbing Pop-Tarts on your way out the door.”

That would be Pop-Tarts, the breakfast staple whose marketers will have you know that they’re—all together now—not just for breakfast anymore.

In 2023, a press release from the brand stressed that Pop-Tarts were “extending into the world of snacking” and a 2024 commercial promoted using Pop-Tarts to make ice cream sandwiches.