The bag says no added nitrites. The same bag in Britain says sodium nitrite.

The Sunday Teardown · Snacks

The front of a bag of Jack Link's Original Beef Jerky says 100% beef, 10 grams of protein and no added nitrites. The nitrite line has an asterisk, and the asterisk says except for those naturally occurring in sea salt and cultured celery extract. Cultured celery extract is how the nitrite gets in. It is celery juice fermented until the nitrate in the celery becomes the same sodium nitrite that cures a hot dog, and it is the twelfth of the 15 ingredients on the bag.

Jack Link's sells Original Beef Jerky in Britain under the same name. The British bag lists curing salt, and in parentheses, preservative, sodium nitrite. It also says something the American bag does not, because European law makes it say so. It takes 161 grams of beef to make 100 grams of this jerky. That one line settles a question I get asked constantly, which is how much beef is in a bag of jerky. The answer is less than most people think, and the reason is sugar.

Then last September the US Department of Agriculture deleted the only number that defined jerky at all. It was a ratio of water to protein that had sat in the agency's labeling policy book for years, and it went at the meat industry's request. So this week is the whole bag. What the cure is, and why the label is allowed to call it something else. How a jerky plant turns a round of beef into a strip that sits on a shelf for a year. What the deleted number would have said about this bag. And what 161 grams of beef comes to against the $6.79 on the shelf tag.

The American bag lists beef, water, sugar, brown sugar, and then 2% or less of sea salt, salt, soy sauce, hydrolyzed corn protein, yeast extract, flavors, maltodextrin, cultured celery extract, beef stock, pineapple powder and citric acid. A 1 ounce serving has 80 calories, 1.5 grams of fat, 520 milligrams of sodium, 6 grams of sugar, all of it added, and 10 grams of protein. There are two asterisks on the front. The first is the nitrite line. The second is no added MSG, except for that naturally occurring in soy sauce, hydrolyzed corn protein and yeast extract, which are three ingredients rich in glutamate.

The British bag, sold in supermarkets there and made in Brazil, lists beef, sugar, sea salt, dried soy sauce, hydrolysed corn protein, yeast extract, spices, curing salt with sodium nitrite, rosemary extract, citric acid, flavourings, pineapple powder and wood smoke. Per 100 grams it has 35 grams of protein, 18 grams of sugar and 5 grams of salt.

Three other bags matter for the comparison. Old Trapper, the big 8 ounce bag from Oregon, lists beef, brown sugar, water, salt, beef stock, hydrolyzed corn protein, vinegar, flavorings and sodium nitrite, and has 600 milligrams of sodium an ounce. The supermarket's own 8 ounce bag lists beef, brown sugar, beef broth, salt, then 2% or less of natural flavors, vinegar, hydrolyzed soy protein, sodium erythorbate, citric acid, paprika oleoresin for color, and sodium nitrite. It has 490 milligrams of sodium and 13 grams of protein an ounce, and the paprika is there because the strip is colored red on purpose. The third is a store brand at another chain, and it lists beef, water, sugar, salt, flavors and yeast extract. Six ingredients, no celery, no nitrite, no cure of any kind, and it sits on the same shelf at room temperature. Keep that one in mind, because it answers the question of whether jerky needs a cure at all.

Beef. Jerky is usually made from the round, the back leg of the animal, because it is the leanest large muscle on the carcass and fat does not dry. It goes rancid. A plant buys inside rounds or lean trim, trims the fat cap off, and slices the muscle across the grain while it is partly frozen so the slices come off the blade clean. The UK bag has the arithmetic printed on it. 161 grams of raw beef becomes 100 grams of jerky, which is a yield of 62%. Old-fashioned jerky, the dry kind that cracks when you bend it, runs about 2.5 pounds in for 1 pound out, which is what you get when a strip that is 73% water is dried to the old ratio with nothing added. This bag is not that product, and the next two ingredients are why.

Water, sugar and brown sugar. These are the marinade, and together they are the second, third and fourth ingredients on a bag that says 100% beef. The water goes back into meat the oven is about to dry, which sounds pointless until you know what is dissolved in it. The sugar is 21% of the finished bag by weight. It is there for flavor, and it is there because sugar holds on to water. A strip with a fifth of its weight in sugar can be dried to a safe level while staying soft, because the sugar binds the water that is left so tightly that bacteria cannot use it. Every soft jerky on the shelf works this way. The strip is safe because of what the sugar does to the water, not because the water is gone.

Soy sauce, hydrolyzed corn protein and yeast extract. Three sources of glutamate, which is the savory taste, declared separately so none of them has to be called monosodium glutamate. Hydrolyzed corn protein is corn protein boiled in acid until it breaks into amino acids. Yeast extract is yeast cells broken open and concentrated. Both are rich in free glutamate, which is the molecule MSG delivers. The no added MSG footnote on the front is accurate. It is also a sentence that only exists because the three ingredients behind it do what MSG does.

Cultured celery extract. This is the cure. Celery is one of the vegetables that stores nitrate from the soil. A supplier juices it, concentrates it, and ferments it with a bacterium, usually Staphylococcus carnosus, which converts the nitrate to nitrite. The powder that comes out is standardized to a nitrite level and sold to meat plants as a curing agent. In the strip it does what sodium nitrite does. It turns the meat pink instead of grey, it gives cured meat its flavor, and it blocks Clostridium botulinum. The nitrite ion in the meat is identical either way. The celery is the route, not the result.

Sea salt. Sea salt is in the nitrite footnote too, and that part is correct. Unrefined sea salt has trace nitrate in it from seawater. Somewhere there was a meeting where someone argued the sea salt had to go in the footnote as well, and I respect the thoroughness.

Pineapple powder and citric acid. Pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that cuts muscle protein, and it is the oldest tenderizer in the business. It sits second to last on the list, which is not a flavor position. Citric acid is the last ingredient and brings the pH down, which helps the cure and the shelf life.

There is no federal standard of identity for beef jerky. The only place the government ever wrote down what jerky was is the FSIS Food Standards and Labeling Policy Book, which is guidance, not regulation. For years its jerky entry said jerky is dried to a moisture to protein ratio of 0.75 to 1 or lower. That is 3 quarters of a pound of water for every pound of protein.

In May 2022 the Meat Institute, the trade group for the packers and processors, petitioned FSIS to delete it. The argument was that the ratio is not what keeps jerky safe. Water activity is. That is a measure of how much of the water in a food is free for bacteria to use, and FSIS's own guideline says jerky is shelf stable at a water activity of 0.85 or lower. The petition said the moisture ratio was outdated, confusing, and might be read as a requirement. On September 8, 2025, FSIS agreed and struck the number. The agency's letter said the reference was outdated and not necessary to ensure food safety. It did not replace it with anything. As of this issue, the word jerky on a package has no definition anywhere in the regulations.

The petition was right about the safety science, and I will walk through why in the second half. What it did not say is what the deleted number meant for the bags on the shelf, and that is what gets me. You can read the moisture to protein ratio of this bag off the nutrition panel. The protein, sugar, fat and salt add up to about 65% of the weight, and nearly all of the rest is water. That puts the Original strip near 0.9 parts water to 1 part protein, above the line the Policy Book drew, and the softer the jerky, the higher the number. The industry asked for the one number that defined the product to be removed. The agency removed it. The bags that would have been on the wrong side of it did not have to change.

So the label says 100% beef over a strip that is a fifth sugar, no added nitrites over a cure, and jerky over a product that no longer has to meet the one test of dryness that ever existed. Every one of those statements is legal. I want to know what the shopper is supposed to do with them.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I walk the smokehouse from the slicer to the oxygen absorber packet in the bag, including the 1 hour at 90% humidity that the whole safety case depends on. Then the cure, what nitrite actually does in the strip and why the celery route costs more and delivers the same molecule. Then the bag priced line by line against 161 grams of beef at this month's boxed beef price, and the supermarket bag that undercuts both brands by 45%. I close with the rule FSIS promised in 2020 and has not written, the beef price, and what I buy.