NOTHING BUTT CHICKEN

Why this exists

Walk down any protein snack aisle. Read the back of any chicken jerky bag. You'll find slurry. Water pumped in. Sugar where sugar has no business being. Cultured celery powder pretending to be “uncured.” Beef collagen casings on something the label calls chicken. Thirty-ingredient panels written in the legal team's favorite font size.

We've been there. We got tired of it. So we built something different.

Chicken Butt Jerky is whole-muscle chicken (thigh and breast), ground, formed into strips by our patent-pending Jerky Robot, and slow-dehydrated at our USDA-inspected facility. Real chicken. Real spices. Real food.

The founder story

Ben Peeri spent fifteen years building high-performance systems for places like JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, and startups including Sensay and Memory Gardens. He knows what it looks like when smart people optimize the wrong thing.

In late 2023, stress, bad nutrition, and burnout caught up with him at the same time. He started reading labels with the same scrutiny he used to read code. Most “protein snacks” failed the audit. The ones that didn't were either bland or expensive. Usually both.

So Ben did what engineers do. He went to the source. He pulled his Middle Eastern grandmother's spice cabinet out of memory, applied it to whole-muscle chicken, and started experimenting in his kitchen. The first batches were too dry, the second too salty, the fifteenth pretty good. The hundredth was the recipe.

The Middle Eastern roots brought the flavor. The tech background brought the ruthless efficiency. And the patent-pending Jerky Robot — built in the same Texas kitchen — was the thing that made it scale without losing what made it good.

How we actually make it

Every bag of Chicken Butt Jerky follows the same four-step process:

What's NOT in the bag

• Mechanically separated chicken
• Beef collagen casing (alpha-gal and Hindu customers — you’re welcome here)
• "Natural flavoring" (a polite phrase for lab juice)
• Artificial flavors or colors
• Cultured celery powder pretending to be uncured
• Corn syrup, maltodextrin, or rice flour
• Gluten, soy, or dairy
• Water pumped in to fake the weight
• Bullshit

The bigger mission

Chicken Butt Jerky is two businesses in one bag.

The brand — what you're holding — is the proof. Real chicken jerky, made the right way, sold direct to people who actually read labels.

The Jerky Robot — the patent-pending equipment behind every strip — is what makes that scale. USPTO Provisional Applications 63/996,608 (Automated Food Product Deposition System) and 64/013,275 (Multi-Channel Extrusion Head) protect the technology. We're licensing it to other small and mid-size meat processors so the next generation of jerky makers doesn't have to compromise on what's in the bag either.

Both halves serve the same mission: clean up the protein aisle.

Who we are

Ben Peeri — Founder and CEO. Recipe developer, engineer, label reader, late-night kitchen experimenter. Background in financial-services engineering and startup product. Middle Eastern by way of Tel Aviv and Texas. Owner of more spice jars than dress shirts.

Behind Ben is a small operating team in Texas, a USDA-inspected production partner in Nebraska, and a growing list of customers, retailers, and distributors who decided the protein aisle had been lying long enough.

Where to find us

Online at chickenbuttjerky.com. On Amazon. On the shelf at select KeHE and UNFI retailers (and growing). At farmers markets in Texas. In our DMs on Instagram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Wholesale and partnership inquiries: hello@chickenbuttjerky.com