March 28, 2024

You’re the Boss: Has Perky Jerky Lost Its Perk?

Courtesy of Perky Jerky.

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Long before Lady Gaga donned her famous meat dress, Brian Levin was wearing a 30-pound beef tunic.

Decked out in silver packets of beef jerky, the entrepreneur’s “jerk suit” made him look like a human-shaped convenience store rack. His mission? Drawing attention to Perky Jerky, a caffeinated meat snack he brought to market two years ago with a co-founder and college buddy, Matt Keiser. Together, they sell it through Home Depot, 7-Eleven, Target, Publix and Sports Authority, claiming nearly $1 million in revenue for 2010.

Yes, you read that right: “caffeinated meat snack.” Perky Jerky’s beef and turkey varieties are steeped in guarana, a Brazilian berry that’s packed with caffeine. The original Web site set up by the company — Performance Enhancing Meat Snacks — claimed that “Each 2 oz. pack of Perky Jerky contains roughly 150 mg. of caffeine, or slightly less than the caffeine amount in 2 Red Bulls.”

But Mr. Levin learned something that Lady Gaga apparently has not: Attention isn’t always such a good thing. In March of last year, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service sent him a cease-and-desist letter two weeks after the snack was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about guarana. The gist of that buzz-killing message was this: Guarana is authorized as a food additive only when used in small quantities as a flavor enhancer, rather than in the larger quantities required to produce a caffeinated boost.

While the U.S.D.A. wouldn’t comment on Perky Jerky’s case specifically, officials explained that the Food Safety and Inspection Service “would not allow producers of beef jerky to add sufficient quantities of guarana to produce a stimulant effect.” In short, the feds told Perky Jerky to go cold turkey.

Since then, Mr. Levin says he has quietly mellowed the brand’s high-octane formula and turbocharged marketing. The word “caffeine” does not appear on new promotional materials or packaging. “We’ve taken down the levels of guarana,” he said. Nowadays, he added, a single serving of Perky Jerky has about as much caffeine as a Diet Coke. (So far, there’s been little mention of the lowered caffeine dose on the company’s Web site, though it did come up on Twitter.)

“We live in a very gray area of government regulation and that’s why we have to be very careful with what we say and how we say it,” Mr. Levin said.

And therein lies a challenge. Ever since the Englewood, Colo., company introduced its unusual snack in August 2009, the product has been marketed to adrenaline junkies as “the meat with a motor.” Mr. Levin still pitches it to the media with a larger-than-life origin story: He and Mr. Keiser were riding a chairlift together at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah when they realized that the beef jerky they’d stashed in a knapsack had been baptized by a leaky Red Bull. He says that they ate the soggy, yet fuel-injected snack and — voila! — the idea for Perky Jerky was born.

During a preliminary interview this April, Mr. Levin explained that getting distribution in national chain stores had been challenging, but that Perky Jerky appealed to retail category managers who “have seen lightning strike before in the form of 5-Hour Energy and even Red Bull.” He added: “This is the next Red Bull.” The strategy seemed to be working. In June, Target stores nationwide began carrying Perky Jerky.

So what do you do when your product loses a main selling point? In other words: What’s Perky Jerky without the perk? Mr. Levin says he hopes to pivot the brand toward a high-end audience by approaching retailers like Whole Foods and Lululemon, pitching it as a low-calorie, protein-rich snack with quality ingredients or, as he puts it (with a straight face), “the filet mignon of beef jerky.”

That might require overcoming stereotypes that lump beef jerky with cowboys, rowdies and the late wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage, who for many years exhorted television viewers to “Snap into a Slim Jim!” It would also mean attracting more female snackers, Mr. Levin added. But that could be tricky for a brand whose slogans include “Everyone wants my meat,” a line that’s available on $20 T-shirts sold at the company’s Web site. Asked whether the shirts jibe with the upscale image he wants to create, he said, “You have to do something that gets people’s attention.”

But the new strategy is not fully in place. Remnants of the old heady, well-caffeinated days still crop up via continued fan sightings of the Jerk Mobile, the company’s Porsche Cayenne S.U.V., which is painted with the Perky Jerky logo and the slogan “caffeinated beef jerky,” along with many online vendors and articles that reflect the old marketing copy and the original 150-milligram caffeine dose. (“It’s out there but, we don’t condone it in any way,” Mr. Levin said of retailers using the outdated messages.) Perky Jerky’s YouTube channel still showcases bobble-headed avatars for Sarah Palin and Larry King discussing the product’s peppy properties. “It is caffeinated beef jerky,” cartoon Palin explains. “Perky Jerky gives me the energy I need to stay up with the Alaskan sun, 24 hours a day!”

It’s clear that there is some confusion in the market. “When we put a product on our site and say it has ‘x’ amount of caffeine in it, it needs to have ‘x’ amount of caffeine in it,” said Jamie Grove, the vice president of marketing at ThinkGeek.com, an e-commerce site that reported $76.3 million in sales for 2010 and has an entire section dedicated to caffeinated products, including Perky Jerky.  The site describes Perky Jerky as “Sweet sweet caffeine in beef jerky form!” and says it contains 150 milligrams of caffeine per bag.

Mr. Grove said the company hadn’t been advised of any changes in Perky Jerky’s caffeine content but planned to check into it. A lower dosage, he said, wouldn’t necessarily exclude it from its offerings, so long as the company knows what that dosage is and can be straight with customers. “If we get some waffly answer and if we don’t come away with confidence I won’t want to have this on our site,” Mr. Grove concluded. “There’s no reason for us to carry things that are marginal. There’s plenty of stuff that’s legit and upfront.”

Earlier this week, a fan on Twitter wrote: “I hope it is an energy drink in food form…” The reply from Perky Jerky? “We just might be .”

Does Mr. Levin worry that consumers may buy Perky Jerky because they have a false impression of how much caffeine is actually in his product?

“I will never worry that people are buying it,” he replied. “I will worry that they’re not.”

In March, Mr. Levin told Entrepreneur magazine he expected Perky Jerky to bring in as much as $10 million for 2011. But in an interview last week, he revised that projection to somewhere between $3 million and $5 million.

What do you think? Can Perky Jerky class up its act and keep its mojo without a caffeine kick? Is there an alternative?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fc1b5c891fe7fd6392feff0cc0db9acc