Jack Link’s CEO shares his message for Gen Z workers: Commit, stick to it, and ‘be really good at it’

Minong, Wisconsin, is the kind of place most people pass through without noticing. With a population of fewer than 1,000, there’s a car dealership, a dollar store, and a couple thousand cattle, surrounded by forests and lakes in the state’s northwestern corner.

But perhaps improbably, it also has the headquarters of a $4 billion multinational meat-snack empire.

For the past 40 years, Minong has been the home base of Jack Link’s, the company behind one of America’s most recognizable beef jerky brands. What began as an effort by namesake founder Jack Link to turn his great-grandfather’s jerky recipe into a livelihood has grown into a global business selling products in more than 55 countries.

Along the way, the company has navigated shifting generational tastes, supply-chain headaches, and pandemic economic upheaval. Now, as a protein boom—fueled in part by GLP-1 weight-loss drugs—drives renewed demand for meat snacks, Jack Link’s finds itself riding a broader surge in the category. In 2025, U.S. sales reached $5.5 billion, roughly double what they were a decade ago.

But for Troy Link, who took over the company’s day-to-day operations from his father in 2013, the philosophy behind success was shaped long before he became CEO.

Growing up around his family’s dairy farm and meat-processing operation in rural Wisconsin, mornings started before most people were awake. Being at work by 6 a.m. wasn’t aspirational—it was expected. His father, Jack Link, kept the same rhythm, and decades later, so does the son who now leads the company.

“It all goes back to history,” Troy Link said. “Whether it was the dairy farm or........

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