I love almost everything Brandweek does, but several weeks ago, the magazine published its best article yet. Titled "It's Good to Be Jerky," the article reported that beef jerky had changed its image, and was now seen as "a healthful snack for on-the-go urban professionals." Resounding confirmation of jerky's surge came from no fewer than four meat-snack professionals. "People's minds have already changed about beef jerky," Alan Bridgeford, president of Bridgeford Foods, told Brandweek. James Sampson, marketing manager for Frito Lay's Oh Boy! Oberto jerky, went a step further, vowing: "If you eat our jerky, you'll get past your problems." Yet a third meat-snack executive confirmed the writer's suspicion that jerky "has arrived."

Was the New Jerky a legitimate cultural phenomenon or mere wishful thinking by jerky-mongering corporate executives? To find out, I called Sampson. What had Sampson meant, I wondered, when he told Brandweek, "If you eat our jerky, you'll get past your problems"?

"I'm sure [the reporter] quoted me accurately, but I can't remember saying that," he tells me. "That is honestly not my belief. My belief is, if you've got problems, you should seek professional help."

Sampson took pains to emphasize that, in his view, there's "a hard road ahead" for jerky. "We want to convince people that this thing they never think about is actually a viable snacking alternative," he says. At the same time, he says, he needs to get folks to stop thinking about Slim Jims. "Right now, if people think jerky, they think Slim Jim," he says. "And we're not that. We're this other thing."

There is, as Sampson explained to me, a kind of natural order of jerky. At the bottom of the barrel is the humble meat stick -- high in fat, so-so in protein and made up of bits of the anatomy of animals that most people would prefer not to eat. "Think about a meat stick," Sampson muses. "It is highly processed. It has a large amount of stuff in it. You can't quite be sure what they put in there. They grind up beef. They grind up chicken ... They put a number of different species in there." Sampson points me toward the ingredients stated on a Slim Jim. "You'll notice that the second ingredient listed is something called 'mechanically separated chicken.' Now, I'm not going to get into how the chicken is separated. Let's just say that it's a pretty interesting process. But, as terrible as it is, it gives the product its mouth feel."

Next up the ladder of meat-snack evolution is "chopped-and-formed jerky," a segment that Sampson finds difficult to explain. "Basically, it's a re-formed stick of beef or a re-formed stick of turkey," he says. "It's finely ground meat, with a relatively high amount of fat, re-formed into something that looks like beef jerky." But what is it, exactly? "All I can say is it's been significantly changed," Sampson says. "It was once something. But it's not that anymore."

Up a notch from chopped-and-formed is something called beefsteak jerky. "Imagine taking a piece of natural-style jerky and grinding it up," Sampson says. "Then, imagine re-forming that into a stick or bar. It's a quarter-inch thick. It's naturally low in fat ... That's your beefsteak jerky."

At the meat-snack summit is natural-style jerky, such as that made by Oh Boy! Oberto. Natural-style jerky is low in fat, high in protein and made from whole cuts of beef. "This is the premium segment of the category," Sampson says. "You take whole-muscle meat. You marinate it. You slice it in a drying house."

"Then you grind it up?" I guessed.

"No," Sampson says. "You don't grind it up. You package it, just the way it is. It's natural-style jerky. It's as close as you get to unadulterated meat."

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