Rashid Ali

Rashid Ali is the co-founder and CEO of Chomps, the Chicago-based snack brand that makes grass-fed beef, antibiotic-free turkey, and venison meat sticks. Under his leadership, Chomps has grown from a Chicago condo side hustle into one of the fastest-growing food brands in America — now in over 30,000 retailers and on track to top $1 billion in annual revenue.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Rashid attended Iowa State University's College of Business and graduated in 2003. After college, he worked as a business operations consultant, advising clients on clean foods and nutrition — experience that would later shape Chomps' ingredient philosophy. He met his future co-founder Pete Maldonado at a poker game in Chicago, where Pete was running a personal training business and frustrated by the lack of clean, high-protein snack options for his clients.

In 2012, the pair launched Chomps as a side hustle out of Maldonado's Chicago condo, each contributing $6,500 of their own money. They originally started as Logic Meat Locker, a grass-fed beef mail-order service modeled after Omaha Steaks, but quickly realized the meat stick format had more potential. The breakthrough came when Trader Joe's called with a purchase order large enough to force them to choose: keep grinding or go all in. Pete went full-time roughly four years in; Rashid followed in 2018.

Chomps has never taken outside capital. The company now operates seven manufacturing facilities, sells roughly 2 million sticks a day, and holds about 10% of the U.S. meat snack market. A product recall in 2024 tested the team's crisis instincts — they expanded the scope preemptively and found no actual contamination — but the response reinforced their consumer-first posture. In 2025, Pete Maldonado transitioned from co-CEO to chairman, leaving Rashid as sole CEO. He has appeared on Masters of Scale and the Emerging Brands Summit, and continues to push Chomps toward what he describes as only the beginning of its potential.