Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When steaks don’t sell you shift to sticks; that’s how Chomps was born. After several failed ventures—one of which left him bankrupt—Pete Maldonado decided to take another chance on launching a business. He partnered with Rashid Ali to start a mail-order service similar to Omaha Steaks, but with grass-fed meat that was more suited to the Paleo diet. When the partners couldn’t get that off the ground, they shifted to individually-wrapped meat sticks; one of the first in a long line of ‘healthier for you’ protein snacks. For several years, each co-founder tried to manage the business as a side-hustle, but the sausage hit the fan in 2016 when a surprise order from Trader Joe’s left them scrambling to produce a million sticks. Today, Chomps is available in major chains across the country and pulls in more than $100 million a year.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:30.0	What was your purchase order for?
0:32.0	1.1 million sticks.
0:34.0	It was larger than the previous year altogether, and a single Pio.
0:39.0	Wow.
0:40.0	And I'm thinking, oh shit, how are you?
0:42.0	This is not what we discussed.
0:44.0	This is way more than what we discussed.
0:47.0	And so I was like, give me a second.
0:48.0	So I go in my room, I build my spreadsheet.
0:51.0	I'm calculating the total.
0:52.0	I was like, what does it actually look like?
0:54.0	So I'm like, Pete, we need, I don't know,
0:56.0	1.0 million to be able to fund this.
0:59.0	And so we then had to figure out how we were going to get the money to even fill this Pio.
1:12.0	Welcome to How I Built This.
1:14.0	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today, how two partners who set out to sell steak wound up making sausage in the form of chops.
	...

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