Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Pete Maldonado, the visionary who took $6,000, one failed food venture behind him, and zero institutional backing and built a dominant food empire that's approaching $1 billion in revenue this year.

Pete and his co-founder Rashid bet everything on a category the entire industry assumed was dead: the gas-station meat stick.

For nearly ten years they bootstrapped taking less than $1M in primary capital prioritizing extreme operational focus and deleting complexity at every corner.

They stayed so maniacally disciplined that they only ever scaled one product format : meat sticksusing just 12 core recipes to capture market share from corporate giants.

But extreme efficiency comes with massive friction.

Pete opens up about the devastating reality of underestimating their explosive demand curve, which cost them 9 figures in lost revenue last year alone, the inside story of surviving an overnight COVID collapse with Trader Joe's, and why he chose to step down as CEO to hand over the keys to his co-founder.

In this masterclass, we break down:

The $6,000 Side Hustle Genesis: How a personal trainer used early Shopify tools and a $99 Photoshop Elements subscription to design a world-class brand from his desk.
The Rule of Deleting Complexity: Why going deep on a single SKU beats going wide, and how relentless simplicity early on became the reason they could scale at all.
The 9-Figure Forecasting Nightmare: The brutal operational pain of undershooting cultural shifts and cutting massive amounts of purchase orders when demand outpaces supply.
The Over-the-Register Museum Trap: How an unexpected plexiglass policy at Trader Joe's wiped out retail sales overnight during COVID—and the pivot that saved the team from layoffs.
The Hidden Weight of Personal Guarantees: Moving past bank-debt structures that put family homes on the line to engineer a 100% secondary private equity deal with Stride Consumer Partners.
Stepping Down at the Peak: Pete's candid psychological transition from active day-to-day CEO to hands-off Chairman to protect his family time and scale the company further.

TIMELINE :

00:00 – Building Chomps on $6,000: a $6,000 food brand from nothing

09:46 – Brand awareness vs. distribution: never hit a shelf before the customer knows you

11:53 – Riding the diet tribes: CrossFit, Paleo, Whole30, Keto, and now GLP-1

19:13 – The 2016 Trader Joe's inbound: staying methodical and rejecting advisor pressure to over-expand

28:05 – Forecasting demand and surviving COVID33:31 – The plexiglass "museum": surviving canceled COVID orders with zero layoffs

37:17 – Personal guarantees & the 100% secondary raise: de-risking the families

40:46 – Casting a wider net: breaking the bottom-of-funnel ROAS trap to unlock top-of-funnel scale

46:15 – Stepping down: from CEO to Chairman

REFERENCES

The Million Dollar Weekend