Max the Meat Guy just launched his own jerky company

Max the Meat Guy has officially unwrapped his own jerky brand.

MaxJerky debuted last week with four flagship flavors: Texas Barbecue beef jerky, Montréal Maple bacon burnt ends jerky, Chili Crisp chicken jerky, and New York Buffalo chicken jerky.

While the company is newly debuted, it’s the culmination of nearly a decade of work from the Meat Guy (aka Max Gleb), whose YouTube videos about all things meat have netted him 4.6 million subscribers and more than 3 billion views.

“A lot of people don’t know this, but it was because of beef jerky. That was like the original passion, and it was the spark that got me into essentially becoming the Meat Guy,” he says in a 22-minute documentary about MaxJerky’s development.

MaxJerky got its original start in 2014, in the wet markets of Beijing, where Gleb and his best friend Kyle sourced fresh ingredients with a plan to make and sell their own jerky. By 2015, it was “all jerky all the time,” and by 2018, Gleb and Kyle began selling MaxJerky at local markets and sporting events in China.

Then, in 2019, Gleb’s mother fell ill, and when COVID hit, Gleb couldn’t return to Beijing. That’s when he took his meat enthusiasm to YouTube.

Gleb revived MaxJerky in January 2022, after seeing how sizable his online audience was becoming. “Slowly but surely that little itch in the back of my head is like, ‘You’re Max the Meat Guy. You should probably launch a jerky product,'” Gleb says.

MaxJerky sells for $9.99 a package, and is only shipping domestic to the U.S. “for now,” the company says. It’s not clear yet if Gleb’s product will join the likes of Feastables and Prime on big box store shelves.

“I hope when they hold it, they can feel what I’ve been trying to put into it,” Gleb says. “This feels like me. This feels like a complete representation of the past ten years of my life. And I hope people receive it that way, and enjoy it.”