First Amos Miller, now Carnivore Snax…

It’s easy to speak in hyperbole when extreme events occur.

It’s easy to get emotional when we witness unjust events occur before our very eyes.

I personally fall victim to this often and try to keep an objective lens on how I share news and stories.

With that said, it’s hard not to speak from a place of anger and outrage when we witness honest, hard workers see their livelihood stripped from their hands at the control of the Ohio Department of Agriculture.

That’s exactly what is happening at Carnivore Snax, one of our personal favorite brands in the healthy foods space. They’ve grown popular over the last three years by providing really high-quality, healthy snacks in the form of beef crisps and other products. It’s one of the most nutritious and healthy snacks on the market because they only utilize beef and salt to make the product.

Simple and pure. Just how we like it.

Three weeks ago, the Ohio Department of Agriculture stormed the Carnivore Snax headquarters, seizing their assets and banning them from selling any more snacks.

As you’ll read in the below e-mail from their founder Mark Ritz (who we had on the podcast back in November), it’s a textbook example of government overreach.

The reason we’re sending this e-mail to spread awareness around what’s happening, and asking our audience to lend any support they can to help Mark and his team navigate these challenging times.

As I said to Mark in a text earlier this week, God has a way of turning our trials into triumphs. I pray we’re witnessing this in real-time and the community will empower a new and better era for Carnivore Snax.

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Check out the Carnivore Snax website to stay up to date on what’s happening.

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Here is the e-mail Mark sent to his customers…

Subject Line: Important update about the future of Carnivore Snax

Three weeks ago, officials from the Ohio Department of Agriculture stormed into Carnivore Snax HQ and shut us down.

They seized our assets and banned us from selling any more Snax.

If you’ve been to our website in the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen that all of our products are listed as “sold out.”

I wanted to take a moment and explain what’s happening... We are in the “fight of our lives” right now with the government.

It’s important that you read every word of this email, because the future of Carnivore Snax depends on it.

We wanted to explain what happened, why it happened, why the government declared war on us, and what we’re doing to fight back and get the company up and running again.

As you probably know, Sylwia and I launched Carnivore Snax back in 2019 with a Kickstarter campaign. We had a dream: we wanted to make the world’s best meat snack. We wanted to build a company that supported regenerative agriculture, our precious farmers, and all of the meat lovers all across the country.

You might not know this…

But our method of making Snax was slightly different than most of the traditional jerky manufacturers. That’s why the meat you get from “Big Jerky” brands tastes like cardboard… and it’s why our Snax are so damn good. As soon as we were up and running, we reached out to the Department of Health, The Department of Agriculture, and a few other regulatory agencies so we could make sure our process was in accordance with state and local laws.

Every organization we contacted said what we were doing was OK, and we could carry on. So, we did. For the past four years, we’ve sold millions of our delicious, nutritious meat Snax to hundreds of thousands of happy, healthy customers all across the USA.

That was until someone inside the Department of Agriculture changed their mind (on a whim) and decided to shut down our operations. It’s a textbook example of government overreach.

And, it’s not the first time something like this has happened. In fact, it happens all the time. Joel Salatin wrote an entire book about the nonsense in the food industry called Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.

These government organizations want you to believe they have your best interests at heart… right up until they show up at your door with guns, like we saw recently with Amos Miller’s farm in Pennsylvania.

This is a tale as old as time. The government is perfectly fine with you spraying your grass with atrazine, injecting cattle with antibiotics and mRNA vaccines, or juicing your cattle up with a cocktail of steroids and hormones…

But the moment you try to make a healthy product and cook it in a new and unique way… well, that’s a bridge too far, I guess. After we got shut down, we reached out to the Department of Agriculture to see what we needed to do to get our company back. As it turns out, there are a number of  “approved” University-backed studies they defer to when it comes to meat products.

And they told us if we follow the guidelines from these studies, they’ll allow us to sell our products again. As of now, we are cooperating with the Department of Agriculture, because that’s what we need to do to save our company.

You might be wondering, what exactly does this mean?

Well…

We decided to reach into our own pockets to fund a new study with a world renowned food science lab that PROVES, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our methodology is not only SAFE…

but it’s SUPERIOR to all other forms of production.

As you can imagine, this is not cheap. It costs a LOT to get this done. And that’s why I’m writing this email to you today. This is our personal Battle of Thermopylae. This is our “last stand.” We’re a direct-to-consumer business. With that model, comes a lot of overhead. When you take this university study we’re funding and all of the lawyer fees we’ve incurred since this happened… the costs have piled up.

Ordinarily, we’d pay these things off from the sales we make from our website. BUT, we haven’t been able to sell anything for the past few weeks. So, that leads us to my next point… The good news is, our study should be complete within 3 weeks.

The lab has looked at our current process and expressed confidence. However, getting everything back up and running is going to a bit more time.

We have been burning cash to keep the company up and running through this temporary shutdown. Two weeks ago, we had to lay off 30 workers. (ALL of whom I am committed to rehiring, as soon as we weather this storm.)

It was one of the worst days of our professional life.

That’s jobs TAKEN from Americans because of this unnecessary government shutdown. But we have one last shot to get things up and running and save the company.

This is it.

We have one chance.

We’re either going to make it through this rough patch and come out on top… or Carnivore Snax will cease to exist. This isn’t some marketing tactic - this is real life. This is the situation we’re in.

Keep an eye on your email inbox because this week, we will run a comeback pre-sale. This sale can save Carnivore Snax.

Not only will this be the small business comeback of a lifetime, but it will shake the industry. Let our Say Yes to Meat voices be heard!!!