Say hello to everyone’s favorite gas station meat snack! Granted, not everyone has a favorite meat snack, whether found at gas station convenience marts or not. But for those who do, the Slim Jim surely fits the bill. I understand that these could be considered a touch controversial, with some of you being decided non-fans. I promise to highlight something with more universal appeal next time, so go enjoy your hummus or spinach dip and the rest of us will delve into the story of the Slim Jim and its start satisfying patrons of taverns in Philadelphia.

Alright, we are past the break, so I hope that some of you are still with us. Are you there? Good. Today, those of us who go to a bar are spoiled for “bar food”. Who is not amazed by the array of menu items, from nachos to onion rings to hot pretzels and everything in between. But in the old days the choices were more limited. Like pickled vegetables and meat products like pigs feet. I will confess that I have never understood the reason to consume a pickled pig’s foot (which I always thought was called a hoof). But it was the 1920’s and life was hard and you were hungry after swilling a few bootleg beers, which probably made about anything taste edible.

Adolph Levis was a small businessmen who pickled food items and sold them to taverns in the Philly. Some time between the 1920’s and the 1940’s (sources vary), he noticed that another popular food item in the bars was pepperoni. What wouldn’t be popular in comparison with pickled pigs feet? Do any of you Slim Jim haters look at them any differently now? Actually, noshing on a big hunk of pepperoni with a frosty mug of your favorite brew sounds pretty appealing to me. But I digress.

Some time in the 1940’s, Levis and his brother-in-law Joseph Cherry hired a local meat packer to concoct a thin, single-serving sausage stick which they called “Penn Rose”. A bunch of them would be packed in a jar of vinegar and slung across bar counters with drafts of Schaefer, Schmidt’s or Ballentine so that a guy in Philadelphia wouldn’t go hungry while he argued with his pals about whether Connie Mack’s Athletics were going to have a decent year against the Yankees.

By the 1950’s the company (by then called Cherry-Levis Food Products) had changed the name of the snack to “Slim Jim” and offered them wrapped individually in cellophane. Is it fair to claim that the modern world burst into existence at that moment? The products continued to grow in popularity all through the northeastern U.S. as the growing interstate highway system offered distribution opportunities.

Along with the Slim Jim name came the product’s first mascot – a tall, thin figure dressed in a tuxedo and sporting a top hat and walking stick. The consensus seems to be that the character was intended to buff up the product’s image. Making the Slim Jim the original high-class meat snack. I just made that part up, because I doubt that “high-class” and “meat snack” have ever appeared in the same sentence before. And to think, here you are to experience it! But I digress. Again.

By 1967, the Slim Jim was distributed through much of the northeast and had become popular enough that General Mills bought the company for something in the neighborhood of $20 million. General Mills moved operations to North Carolina and combined the Slim Jim operation with that of the Jesse Jones Sausage Company, calling the combination Goodmark Foods. Some Goodmark executives bought the company when General Mills put it up for sale in the early 1980’s, and kept it until selling to ConAgra in 1997.

What’s in a Slim Jim? It depends on when you ask. The recipe has been changed several times over the decades. The current formulation goes back to the 1990’s, and appears to include a mixture of beef, pork and chicken. It is claimed that no organ meat has been used for several decades now, but beyond that it is probably best to just move right on from this topic. And who are we to fuss about what is in a Slim Jim? Have you noticed how your bread never turns moldy now? Big Chem is now in control of everything we eat, so what’s an occasional Slim Jim going to do to you?

It has developed that the biggest market for the Slim Jim is young males. This shouldn’t surprise us. The company figured it out when it hired pro wrestler Randy Savage as its spokesman. The company has managed to keep young males coming back, more recently with an online presence fueled by a creative and irreverent Instagram account (Sl1M Jim) run by a former fan whose account dwarfed the company’s official one.

So, there you go. The venerable Slim Jim, the grandaddy of single-serving meat sticks is still there to satisfy your snacking needs. The familiar red and yellow packaging is there to grab your attention the next time you are in line for the self-checkout at the grocery or when you go into the gas station because the pay-at-the-pump isn’t working. And while you are inside, forget the lottery ticket and go with the sure thing that is a Slim Jim.