🍖 Stat of the Day: Meat sticks, the on-the-go gas-station snack eaten by both construction workers and Jennifer Lawrence, are currently the fastest-growing category in all of snacks, the Wall Street Journal reports. In other words: Slim Jim is transitioning into its final form of Big Jim.

• Sales of dried meat snacks excluding jerky were up 10.4%, to ~$3.3 billion, through December 29, 2024, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to consumer-analytics firm Circana.
• ~41 million households buy meat sticks annually, according to Conagra’s Spade.

The benefactors: Big Meat Stick (of course). But also industry upstarts like Chomps, which started as a side hustle in 2012 and is now spinning enough meat sticks to make it the fastest-growing snack food brand in the US, according to data collected by Numerator.

🤔 Did You Know? At least three different groups of insects – ambrosia beetles, leafcutter ants, and fungus-growing termites – have evolved to domesticate (farm) certain species of fungi.

📰 Worth a Read: What makes some of us crave self-insight more than others? → (Psych)