Pick up a bag of beef jerky next to a bag of crisps and the price difference is hard to miss. Gram for gram, jerky is one of the most expensive snacks on the shelf — and if you only compare pack weights, it can look hard to justify. But the two products are not really comparable at all. One is mostly potato and frying oil; the other is concentrated meat. This article walks through where the cost of jerky actually comes from — the meat, the shrinkage, the drying time — and shows a fairer way to compare snack prices: protein per euro, not grams per euro.
We are deliberately not quoting prices here, because prices change. What does not change is the structure of the cost, and that is printed on every honest label. We will use real figures from our own NAKOTNE packs throughout, so you can check every number against the product pages.
It takes up to 250 g of meat to make 100 g of jerky
The single biggest reason jerky costs what it does is hiding in a line on the pack that most people skip: the meat-content declaration. Drying removes most of the water from meat, and water is weight. What goes into the dryer is a lot heavier than what comes out. Here is what that looks like across our range:
- Beef Jerky Original — 210 g of beef used to produce 100 g of finished jerky.
- Beef Jerky Barbeque, Jalapeño and Teriyaki — 153 g of beef per 100 g of product.
- Pork Jerky Original — 250 g of pork per 100 g. That is two and a half kilos of meat for every kilo of jerky.
- Meat sticks — between 160 g and 179 g of meat per 100 g, depending on the recipe.
Now scale that to what you actually buy. A single 35 g portion of our Original jerky started life as roughly 74 g of raw beef. A full 280 g box (8 × 35 g) required almost 590 g of beef — well over half a kilo of meat pressed into a box you can hold in one hand. For the pork version, a 280 g box takes a full 700 g of pork. Even the "lighter" 153 g recipes need around 430 g of beef per box.
No potato-based snack works this way. Potatoes lose water in the fryer too, but a kilo of potatoes costs a small fraction of a kilo of beef — so the shrinkage barely matters to the price. With meat, the shrinkage is the price.
Meat is the most expensive base in the snack aisle
Almost every mainstream snack is built on a cheap commodity base: potato, corn, wheat flour or rice, plus oil, salt and flavouring. Those raw materials are among the cheapest calories agriculture produces, which is exactly why crisps can be sold so cheaply.
Jerky starts at the opposite end of the ingredient market. Beef and pork are premium agricultural products — animals raised over months, then slaughtered, butchered and trimmed. Jerky is made from lean cuts with the fat trimmed away, because fat does not dry well, so a portion of the carcass never makes it into the product at all. When your starting material already costs many times more per kilo than potato, and you then need roughly one and a half to two and a half times its weight to end up with the finished snack, the shelf price follows directly.
Slow drying costs time, energy and factory space
A crisp is fried in minutes. Jerky is marinated, laid out and dried slowly at controlled low temperatures — a process measured in hours, not minutes. All that time, the product is occupying drying equipment, consuming energy and being monitored. Meat is also a far less forgiving raw material than potato: it demands cold-chain handling before production, strict hygiene during it, and documented food-safety controls throughout. Our NAKOTNE jerky is made in Latvia under the IFS food-safety standard, and that level of traceability and control is part of what a pack costs.
The upside of doing it properly: drying is exactly what makes jerky shelf-stable for months at room temperature, with no fridge, no freezer and no cold logistics between the factory and your bag.
What you are not paying for: fillers
Turn the question around and the price makes more sense. A cheap snack is cheap because most of what you are eating is inexpensive starch. A meat-first jerky cannot borrow cheapness from fillers — and the result shows up in the nutrition table. Because drying concentrates what remains, our Beef Jerky Original ends up with 41.6 g of protein per 100 g, and the Pork Jerky Original with 53.7 g per 100 g. Both are high in protein, and that density is precisely what you are paying for: the water left, the meat stayed.
The label makes this easy to verify on any brand. If the meat-content line is missing or low, and the ingredient list leans on starches and sweeteners, you are looking at a meat-flavoured snack — not a meat snack — whatever the price tag says.
The fair comparison: protein per euro, not grams per euro
Comparing snacks by pack weight is comparing water and starch. The honest comparison is what you actually get out of the pack — and for jerky, that is protein. The calculation works with any two products in front of you: divide the price by the grams of protein in the pack, and compare that.
A worked example with our own packs
One 280 g box of our Beef Jerky Original contains roughly 116 g of protein (41.6 g × 2.8). The pork version carries just over 150 g per box. A single 35 g portion of the Original delivers about 14.5 g of protein on its own.
Typical potato crisps carry somewhere around 6 g of protein per 100 g — check any bag, the number is on the label. To match the protein in one box of our Original jerky, you would need to eat nearly two kilos of crisps, along with all the oil and salt that comes with them. Run the price-per-gram-of-protein maths on whatever the two packs cost in your shop, and the gap between jerky and cheap snacks shrinks dramatically — and often flips.
So what does the price of a pack actually buy?
Strip the price of a well-made jerky down and it is a stack of real costs, not margin on air:
- The meat itself — the dominant cost, at 153–250 g of lean raw meat per 100 g of product in our range.
- The shrinkage — you pay for the water that left, because the farmer and butcher were paid for it.
- Slow, controlled drying — hours of energy, equipment time and monitoring per batch.
- Food safety and traceability — cold-chain handling, certified production, full labelling.
- Sensible packaging — our boxes hold eight sealed 35 g portions, so the last portion is as fresh as the first.
If you want to see the numbers behind any specific flavour, every listing in our beef jerky collection and jerky sticks collection carries the full meat content, ingredient list and nutrition table for that exact pack.
Frequently asked questions
Why is beef jerky so expensive compared to crisps?
Because the raw material is lean meat, not potato, and drying shrinks it: our recipes use 153–250 g of fresh meat to make 100 g of jerky. You are paying for the meat that went in, not the weight that came out.
Is beef jerky worth the price?
Judge it on protein per euro rather than grams per euro. A 280 g box of our Original jerky holds roughly 116 g of protein — matching that with typical crisps would take nearly two kilos of them. On that basis, well-made jerky is competitively priced for what it delivers.
How can I tell quality jerky from an overpriced one?
Read the label. Look for a clearly declared meat content (ours ranges from 153 g to 250 g per 100 g), a high protein figure per 100 g, and an ingredient list built around meat and seasoning rather than starches and sweeteners. A clear origin and a food-safety standard like IFS are good signs too.
Why is jerky sold in small 35 g packs?
Portion control and freshness. Dried meat is concentrated, so 35 g is a genuinely satisfying portion — about 14.5 g of protein in our Original. Eight individually sealed packs per box mean nothing goes stale in a half-open bag, at home or in a backpack.
Why do some jerky brands cost much less?
Usually the answer is in the meat-content line: less meat per 100 g, more fillers, sweeteners and binders. That is not automatically bad — but it is a different product. Compare the declared meat content and the protein per 100 g, and the price difference usually explains itself.