Meet the Meats: Made-with-Honey Jerkies Trend…

Where’s the beef? It was certainly at the Sweets & Snacks Expo, along with plant-based meat; grass-fed jerky; and sweet and savory meat combinations leading to one of the major trends of the show.

The meat snacks market is booming, and Darren Seifer, industry analyst at the NPD Group, said at the Expo that well-developed snacks/treats helped consumers find comfort depending on their mood. The five mood categories Seifer used to illustrate the notion were:

• Bored
• Depressed
• Calm
• Cranky
• Stressed

Meat snacks were named in four of the five categories as sweet and savory indulgences that consumers turn to when eating based on mood.

Savory snacks were also booming during specific occasions, such as screen time snack consumption (up 9%) and during movie and game nights (up 12%). We found a number of great made-with-honey meat products that all brought something a little bit different to the sweet combined with savory category.