All Episodes

August 13, 2025 15 mins
Paul Corvino sits down with CEO of Archer Jerky, Eugene Kang. Archer Jerky, often referred to as Country Archer Jerky Co., is a brand of meat snacks known for using real, high-quality ingredients, including 100% grass-fed beef. They focus on crafting snacks with natural flavors and avoiding artificial additives, preservatives, and fillers. 
Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is CEOs you should know with division president of iHeartMedia,
Paul Corvino. Today, I'm here with Eugene Kang, the founder
and CEO of Archer Meat Snacks, one of America's leading
meat snack brands.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Thanks for having me, Paul.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Before we get started and we learn about your entrepreneurial journey,
I like to do a quick, rapid Q and a
rapid fire. Can't Thanks, got to answer right away, get
the brain working, the mouth moving. You ready?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
That sounds good?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Okay? Ski or beach vacation. Beach Beatles are stones Beatles,
Tom Brady or Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Sean Connery or Daniel.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Craig, Daniel Craig, Star Wars or Godfather, Godfather celebrity people
say you remind them of I don't even know.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
All right, we're gonna come. We're gonna go, guys, everyone
in this room. We'll come up with one, but we're welcome. Say,
I want to learn you know a lot about art,
your meat snacks, but first let's find a little bit
about yourself and the journey you took to getting there.
So I understand you started working in your family's convenience store.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, so tell me about that. Yeah, my family are
immigrants from South Korea. They've owned gas stations all my life,
since I was a kid. We're about to all here
at all through out southern California, palmed Out to Palm Springs,
to the High Desert, all throughout southern California. You know,
I worked at the gas station since I was probably

(01:31):
six seven years old, not doing a lot of work,
but just you know, learned to use the register for
the first time as a as a six year old.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
So a lot of people scratch a little cars.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, it's exactly right. Actually, yeah, that's right. I've watched
a lot of people scratch a lot of cars. Actually,
funny story when I was working at my dad's gas
station in Palm Springs when I was like seven years old,
I got so good at doing the register. My dad
would just kind of sit back watch me do the register.
And this lady came in and bust a lot of
tickets and I just knew how to ring every up
and I was trying to do the transaction for it.

(02:02):
She got really upset, She's like, what are you doing?
You can't sell me this? And my dad got out
of his chairs, like okay, I'll take care of it.
From that moment, I never understood why she was so upset,
but I guess, you know, just the fact of a
seven year old selling lotto tickets beyond the cashture. Was
this a maybe it was like a weird site, no
no big winners, So maybe she did a good thing.
Now buy a lot of tickets from Hey, I don't.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Know, tell me how long did you do that for?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, I mean I grew. I mean I was kind
of my like upbringing, and then you know, fast forward
to twenty ten. My partner and I were on a
road trip. It was actually more of like, aw, you
get your partner. She's my aunt, so, my dad's youngest sister.
She and I were on a road trip family trip
up to the Grand Canyon. We stopped at one of
these little roadside stands at a billboard on the side

(02:47):
of the freeway said fresh natural beef, jerkey stop here
in the next you know, a few miles we stopped it. It
was a small little roadside stand, mom pop retailer.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, I did a great one on the way to
Vegas where they have I think thirty seven different.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
So he stopt that that's so he stopped that is
that store Alligator jerky, that's right, So we stopped that
is that store. And I had asked the store owner, like, hey,
you know who's making this product for you? Because it's
clear you're not making this product, but it's it's an
incredible product. And they pointed me to this small, little
old at the time I was twenty one, a small
little co manufacturing plant based in Grand Terrace, which is

(03:22):
in the Inland Empire. You know, track down the owner
of that of that business, eighty year old gentleman butcher
by Trade was really doing it for a labor of love.
At this point in his life. It wasn't really to
make money, small business doing about, you know, fifty thousand
dollars a month in sales. He was primarily just private
labeling it. So if you wanted to call it, you know,

(03:44):
iHeart radio jerky, He'd do a few hundred bags for you,
make your label, and that was his business model. I
thought it was an incredible product, so I just said,
you know, hey, why aren't you pushing your own brand?
You should really be competing with a lot of these
big commercial, you know, name brand meat snacks out there.
And he had no interest obviously at his age and

(04:04):
where he was at in his life. And so you know,
we had the crazy idea of what don't we just
buy you out and go scale your business and frankly
pay homage to what you've been doing for thirty plus years,
which is making gourmet, premium, high end meat snacks.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
And you as a twenty one year old kid finding
finding the jerky and then tracking him down and getting
out there and saying I want to buy your business.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, basically, yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Being being young, that make it. Was he very skeptical
for sure.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I mean my aunt was there obviously, and she's you know,
she's a little bit more established, and obviously there's some
credibility there for sure in terms of you know, not
obviously my age, but yeah, for sure. I mean he's
looking at us TO to Korean you know folks just
walking in like what do you know about USDA and
you know, meat manufacturing, et cetera. But look, we just

(04:55):
I was telling my partner at the time, my aunt,
I was like, listen, like, as a twenty one year old,
I can tell you right now, there's an interesting intersection
when it comes to what I want to consume in
terms of brands versus what the prior generation had consumed.
And I was relaying the fact that like at that time,

(05:15):
we were going to a lot of craft breweries, my
friends and I, and Kraft Brewers are starting to pop
up here and there, and we stopped drinking all the
traditional beer brands that you thought, right, whether it's you know, Budlight, Budwiser,
et cetera. And so I said, there's an interesting intersection
here where I think consumer consumer brands are going to
really start. They're going to need to step up their

(05:36):
game and cater to a much more younger cohort that's
going to be more affluential. It's going to make a
lot of the pursuing decisions over the next ten to
fifteen years. So we decided to buy the business and
really pursue this kind of gourmet kind of view of
meat SAX, but on a more commercial level.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
So you buy the company. How long a process? What
was that? Like?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
It was few months? It wasn't too bad. I mean,
you know, it was again he was the sole owner.
It was a very small business who was selling to
at the time, just again a lot of small mom
pop retailers, like none of them was a named brand retailers.
It was all mom pop shops.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
So you immediately increased his distribution by going into your stores.
But that's but that's not enough.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
No, it's like two or three stores.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
You got to get into other stores. How does the
industry work? They're like wholesalers that sell to all convenience stores.
That third party that you have to go through.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, there is, there's distributors, wholesalers. There's the direct retailers
like you know, you know, shout out to like our
local grocery stores out here at South of California like
Smart Final or State or Brothers or Rafts, like they
can buy direct from you as well. So you know
right away about the business. I mean, obviously we wanted
to kind of take time to understand how to manufacturing
process works and start launching the brand. Because the brand

(06:55):
at the time was Country Archer. Okay, we rebranded it
to Archer Archer. Yeah. And you know, he didn't have
a brand out there because while the name was on
the side of his building, he never had pushed his
own brand because he was his business model was privately
abeling it for a lot of small retailers. So immediately,
right away we start to work on the branding and

(07:15):
start thinking about how to push the brand out.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
There, get it on your own?

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Did you hire any We hired a designer, a graphic
designer to help kind of mock up the first image
of the branding.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
So you had a designer, but you didn't hire an agency,
didn't hold focus groups. You did it based on your
own gun.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
You were your focus group.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Me and my partner were the focus group. That's correct. Yeah,
and you know, got the brand ready to officially quote
unquote launch and started making calls in twenty fourteen to
several retailers. You know, and as you can imagine.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Before you made those calls, did you did you what
was the plan? How fast were you going to ramp up?
You can't go out and sell ten thousand convenience stores.
Then you've got to manufacture that and get it out.
How did you stagger it?

Speaker 2 (08:01):
I shul didn't think that far ahead. I didn't plan
that far. I just knew that. Look what I knew
is we had an incredible product. We were you know,
we had like ten ten folks, ten employees making the
product for us. All I can think about was we're
doing fifty thousand a monff in sales, private labeling the
stuff for the small mob of our retails. I needed
to just double my sales. And the first thing I

(08:23):
was thinking about is just how do I get in
the door with any of these retails with our brand right?
And I didn't think about the production, what our capabilities were.
I didn't stagger any of that stuff. It was really
just kind of dog chasing cars, like I'm just going
to go and just see what so.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Many of the entrepreneurs that we have in here they
said a lot of their theory of the strategies, just
do it and then we'll figure out how to get
it done. That's we'll figure out how to get it done.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
That's basically what it was. It was really just like
I'm going to go sell and see what I can
drum up and we'll kind of figure out the rest
from there. And that's kind of what we did. I mean,
as a matter of fact, there was a lot of
sleep as nights where and I think our first big
retail break was actually Sprouts And when I they said
this was twenty fourteen when they sent their first PO
and I remember thinking to myself, like, again, we were

(09:10):
doing fifty thousand moff in sales, private labeling and stuff.
I mean, it was basically a glorified restaurant. Anything about
like our ordering processing, you know, Joe retailer was what.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Was the sale? What was your proposition value that you
offered the retailers.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
We were a premium, better for you jerky that was
different than the conventional ones that you find in gas stations.
It was softer, it had more flavor, our ingredients were real.
You could pronounce every ingredient thing you had. It was
one hundred percent grass fed beef. It was. The way
we positioned was we are a more premium elevated meat
snack offering that you currently.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Don't offer any price wise.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Had to compare price wise, it was pretty comparable, I
mean it was.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
It was.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
It was a bit more premium for sure.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Product for a slightly slight more money. But what you're saying,
the value proposition is pretty sounds pretty significant.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's right. Like we thought that the price relative to
the value proposition that we were offering made a lot
of sentence, and luckily retailers like Sprouts and Kroger kind
of said, yeah, that's right, and let's let's bring it in.
But actually before that, I would say, like, just to
back up, I'd knock on retailer doors for like two
years and again, as you can imagine, no experience in industry,

(10:22):
I'm just cold emailing random inboxes, you know, like info
at you know whatever. Info.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
It wasn't just sell to one distributor who We'll get
him everywhere.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
I was emailing every retailer through Google and trying to understand,
like who can I reach out corporate to get me
a meeting with the buyer, not knowing how the whole
industry would work.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
And you were the sales team, so you were me production, sales,
and marketing all the life of the entrepreneur, that's right. Yeah,
a lot a lot of sleepless nights, A lot.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Of sleepless nights. Yeah, got a lot of retailers that
basically take a meeting said no to us, say hey, listen,
I why would I need to bring this in. I
already have you know, slim gym or Jacklinks or these
big brands, and I don't really need another brand.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
So the big break was Sprouts. That was the first
big sale. And did it immediately take off?

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, and but but before sprouts. Actually, what
I would say is because I kept getting rejected by
these retailers and where nothing brand, I.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Had to come up with just bring any samples, by
the way.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
I did right here today. No I didn't, but I
definitely will send some uh like uh we. I basically
was asking one of the retailers that kept rejecting us, like, well,
what is it that you need? Like, I just need
something different. I mean, I get that it's grass fed
and premium, but it's still original, It's still Taraoki, Like,
what's my What's what's so different in unique? Besides the Graspendna,

(11:41):
keep mind, this is twenty thirteen grass fed beef and
how you think about clean greens. It was not in
the zeitgeistaid it was today. So at that year, we
had saw this shortage of siracha, the famous sarracha hassauce,
because the plant got shut down in Baldwin because the
chili roasting they kind of mess with the neighbors, eyes,
et cetera. So there's a whole ordeal. So I was

(12:02):
in an office, a buying office at one of the
grocerytailers in Arizona, and the buyer just kept, you know,
to the side talking to to another buyer, like, I
can't believe they're rationing palettes of hot sauce to me
because they're just shut down right now and they just
need hot sauce. And I thought, man, like, these retailers
are like fighting over bottles of hot sauce because Saracha

(12:24):
plant shut down. So immediately reach out to the Saracha
plant said hey, listen, I would love to get your
licensing rights to have your flavor on my bag and
would you be open to that?

Speaker 1 (12:36):
So you built your brand association with another brand, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
So I'm an upcoming Asian entrepreneur would love to just
pick your brain and see if I can partner a
few And they said, yeah, sure, why not. We'd have
to prove the hot, we'd have to prove the formula,
et cetera. I said absolutely, So we got it to work,
got the actual image of their bottle and the flavor
Seracha on our new packaging. That was our newest flavor essentially.

(12:59):
So went back out to these retailers like Sproutings and
say listen, like, I know you said you want something different.
What about the officially licensed sarracha jerky and they were like,
that's that's great, that's exactly what we want. We'll take that,
we'll bring that in out. Before you do that, I
need my original Ontariokeey to be part of the brand
block because I can't just have one item going into
the into the sore.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
So that was that was the key right there.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
That was my trojan horse.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
That was ye, that was your trojan horse, getting getting
that that partnership and being able to take advantage of
that brand that was already built.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
And so today now here we are now in twenty
twenty five, that ten years later. How many locations are you.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
In We're in thirty thousand locations.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
How many employees do you have?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
We have over twinter employees.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
Gratulations, that's and you still you still look like you're
twenty one.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Definitely not in my twenties. But you know, it's been, Uh,
it's been. It's been one heck of a journey. There's
a lot of a lot of ups and downs. For sure.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
You get it online.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Also, you get it online and on Amazon. You can
find it at your local Costco, Whole Foods.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, it's Archer.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Just go to Archer Archerjerky dot com.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Archerjerky dot com. And what stores are you in?

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Whole Foods, Costco, Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, I mean your
local grocery store.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Once again, we're talking with Eugene Kang, the founder and
CEO of Archer Meat Snacks, with an incredible story, a
great entrepreneur story. A young man twenty one years old,
he's now barely thirty and he's built this tremendous business.
And am I wrong? I mean, I'm trying to do
the band going.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
On, it's twenty ten. I'm like, I'm thirty six.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Now, okay, yeah, so barely thirty thirty six okay, And
he's built this incredible company. If you're interested, you can
go to what are the stores again.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Whole Foods, Costco, Sprouts, Target, Walmart, Sam's Club, any any
local grocery store, Archer, Archer Jerky.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Once again, Thank you, Eugene. This is Paul Corvino, Division
President of iHeartMedia saying thanks for listening to another episode
of CEOs you Should Know. Listen to CEOs you Should
Know on the iHeartRadio app
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.