Owners of Jack Link's navigate mix of food politics in the Trump administration

INTERVIEWER: If I had to guess-- and I think I'm going to be right about this-- you've probably heard of Jack Link's, the world's largest manufacturer of meat snacks. Its beef jerky and beef sticks are popular gas station snacks. You pull in. You got to have some kind of food to keep you going. And Jack Link's also sells his products to school districts for school lunches. The company has dual headquarters in Minneapolis and Northwestern Wisconsin. What you may not know is that the owners of the company have spent millions on Donald Trump's presidential campaign, a move that has given them access to the White House.

But now Jack Link's and the processed meat industry are caught between conflicting ideologies in the Trump administration over the future of food policy. Reporter John McCracken has been looking into Jack Link's lobbying efforts for Investigate Midwest. He joins me now, and thanks for being here.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Thank you so much for having me.

INTERVIEWER: So what got you interested in looking into Jack Link's lobbying efforts?

JOHN MCCRACKEN: That's a great question, I think. I'm based in Wisconsin, and I really just started looking at who are the big players in Wisconsin and the Midwest for meat. And my beat is to cover the meat industry for our newsroom. So that led me down sort of a rabbit hole into Jack Link's and the family, and the history of the business in Wisconsin, as well as Minnesota, Minneapolis.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. And it's not unusual for companies to donate to political campaigns. Nothing wrong with that. But tell me, so tell me a little bit more, though, about the Link family's political contributions over the past several years.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Definitely. The Link family political contributions are really just tied almost entirely to the Trump campaigns in recent years. So in 2020, we saw donations directly to the campaign from the Link family, over $1 million. And then in 2024, Troy Link, who is the current CEO of Jack Link's and the son of the founder of the company, Jack Link. Troy donated a half a million dollars to the America Pac, which some folks might recognize as the Elon Musk-founded--

INTERVIEWER: Sure.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: --political campaign that did a lot of spending on behalf of the Trump campaign and put him alongside other people in the tech and cryptocurrency industry who were donating to the America Pac.

INTERVIEWER: Got it. So now in May, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., so he released a new report and recommended, look, Americans, consume less sugary drinks and processed foods. And what has been the response of Jack Link to this report?

JOHN MCCRACKEN: So Jack Link's directly have not addressed the MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again report, but at the same time that this sort of MAHA movement is gaining traction in the new administration, and we're starting to see this report coming out, state legislation that is inspired by the report, and this shift in mindset of food policy, Jack Link's is gearing up and has been lobbying at the federal government for the first time in the company's history. So just this year, 2025, they have registered, as paying lobbyists, and are spending money to speak with people at the federal level about sood policy, and dietary guidelines, and those sort of things that are going to be influenced by the MAHA report.

INTERVIEWER: Right, and there have been shifts in policy over the years. Back in the Obama era, there was a rule prohibiting reimbursement of beef jerky and dried meat products for school food purchases. I think that was back in 2011. Those roles were revisited during the first Trump administration. So there is back and forth policy on the federal level.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Yeah. So that's a really interesting case because this was an example of the direct link between Jack Link's and the administration. During the Trump administration, sort of a small rules change that went unnoticed, probably by most people, that the food services were starting to revisit what counts as reimbursable for a school district to get money back from the federal government for spending. At the time, products like beef jerky, dried beef products, dried meat products, processed snacks, meat snack products were disqualified from that program. They didn't count as something that would be a protein substitute or part of a lunch program for schools.

Jack Link's, during the first Trump administration, had already spent millions of dollars, had gained access to the Trump campaign and direct administration, and they lobbied and told the federal government, hey, we should be included. These types of products should be included. And they even had Wisconsin senators and congressional members who were also saying the same thing to the federal administrations. And that rule got changed. And they now are reimbursable products in school lunches.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. And so companies lobby to protect their market share. Senators, Congress people, they represent their local companies. So have you looked into lobbying by other major snack brands? I imagine they're all busy right now.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Yeah, it's really interesting. I did take some time to see who else is interested in this movement in the snack, especially meat snacks, sort of comparable to the Jack Link's brand. So the company that owns Slim Jim, which people are probably familiar with--

INTERVIEWER: Sure.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: It's called Conagra, which is a big food and snack conglomerate based out of Chicago. And an interesting case here is that in this past year, Conagra has publicly said, hey, we're going to agree with the MAHA report. We are going to remove artificial dyes and some artificial ingredients from our products by 2026, 2027. They're sort of phasing those things out. At the same time, they have lobbying records and details of meeting with people at the federal level to voice specific concerns of, we didn't like things that were said in the MAHA report.

So there's a little bit of playing both sides there, where we'll do what you're asking and we're going to follow that trend of what the administration, and presumably, the administration's supporters and voters want to see happen. But we also don't like that this is happening, and we kind of disagree with what you're asking us to do.

INTERVIEWER: So what are you going to be following or looking ahead? We'll call it the beef jerky industry. So what are you going to be following here? Because you got a nice-- you have a nice thread of a story that is obviously going to continue.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Yeah, really, we're in the first eight months or half year or so of the second Trump administration. And given Jack Link's connection to the administration, they've hosted private fundraisers for the Trump campaign while he was campaigning. I'm just looking to see how that pays off for the company. They are the biggest snack beef product manufacturer in the world. They have connections across the globe to Australian beef, Brazilian beef, Canadian beef, things like that.

So we have things like tariffs that are affecting beef and other changes in the administration, snap cuts that are affecting food purchasing. So they're a good sort of microcosm of how this will play out for a really meat-focused company with everything that is happening at the federal level.

INTERVIEWER: Well, thank you very much for your time, and good luck on your reporting.

JOHN MCCRACKEN: Thank you. I appreciate it.

INTERVIEWER: That was John McCracken, a reporter for Investigate Midwest. And just a note, we reached out to Jack Link's for comment, but we did not receive a response by the time of this broadcast.