We recently connected with Chad Farokhnia and have shared our conversation below.

Chad, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

For my Birthday 5 years ago, my wife bought me a dehydrator so I could start making my own beef jerky at home. Since I love eating beef jerky she thought this would be the perfect gift. I spent a month reaching online how to make the best homemade beef jerky and then started playing around with different ingredients and came up with a sweet and spicy flavor that tasted really good. I started giving it out to family and friends and everyone loved and said it ‘s the best beef jerky they ever had and that I should start selling it. This is how The Originator flavor was born. We started selling it to just family and friends and created a Facebook and Instagram account for our jerky and people in our city started buying it. We later found out if we wanted to be in stores, that we would have to follow USDA guidelines and have our product manufactured so we spent time researching companies to produce our product for us. It took about 6 months for the company to get our product right and then we were able to wholesale our jerky to stores throughout Florida and beyond.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Since I can remember, I have always loved beef jerky. One year my wife decided to buy me a dehydrator for my birthday so I could start making jerky for myself. I invented the sweet and spicy garlic teriyaki flavor which is now called “The Originator” and started giving it out to family and friends. They all raved about it and suggested I started selling it and that is how South Florida Local Jerky was born.

We are a small family owned and operated business located in Plantation, FL. It is myself as the CEO & Founder,
my Wife as the COO of the company handling the day to day operations and our 6 year old son who you see often in our social media videos and posts.

Soflo Jerky is handcrafted in small batches and made with premium beef. It very tender and packed full of flavor and High in Protein! We pride ourselves on with being made in the USA and only using the finest of ingredients. Our jerky is minimally processed without nitrates, nitrites, gluten or MSG.

We currently have 6 flavors to choose from including a new flavor the Orange Blossom Special. Our Beef Jerky Flavors range from Mild to Hot and we also carry one exotic meat, our Alligator Jerky.

Whether you are out fishing on the lake, watching your favorite sports team or relaxing on the beach, we’ve got the best snack that will keep you coming back for more.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Yes, we manufacture our product. It all started when we got a house visit from the USDA as we were selling our homemade product in a store and that is not allowed. For beef jerky, you must have a USDA manufacturing facility producing your product or your own facility, it can not be made in your kitchen. So we had to research different jerky companies around the country that co-pack jerky and get estimates on what the costs will be. Of course, this turned out to be way more money than what it was costing to make it ourselves and the profit margin wouldn’t be as great either, but we knew we had a great product and had to give it a try. We finally found one that would work with us, but it took over 6 months trying to get our products to taste as close to our homemade as they could. One of the challenges with working with a large manufacturing facility, is that they will not produce less than 120 lbs of each jerky flavor and we were used to only making 20-30lbs of jerky at home so finding the money and taking out loans was a challenging at times.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Once we were using a manufacturing company, we thought all of our problems were over, but then the USDA reached out and said that we needed to change our name South Florida Local Jerky because our jerky is not produced in Florida, it is in another state. Believe me, we would have loved to have found a manufacturer in our state, but there are no jerky co-packing companies in Florida so had to choose a company elsewhere.

We were adamant that we would not be changing our name and built a case and went back and forth with the USDA, but in the end we had to move forward with changing our name to SoFlo Jerky, which I think worked out better for us having a shorter more catchier name.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.soflolocaljerky.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/south_florida_local_jerky_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soflolocaljerky