His 6-Figure-a-Month Side Hustle Landed in Costco: Low and Slow

Key Takeaways

- In 2019, Jared Drinkwater set out to develop the perfect BBQ chip.

- Drinkwater partnered with his friend Mike Zbuchalski to bring the vision to life.

- Now, Drinkwater is eyeing a $20 million business within the next 18 months.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Jared Drinkwater, 50, of Dallas, Texas. Drinkwater co-founded wood-smoked snack brand Low and Slow with Mike Zbuchalski in 2019. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Image Credit: Low and Slow. Jared Drinkwater.

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?

I was a brand marketer at big companies for 20 years prior to starting Low and Slow, including seven at Frito-Lay. Most recently, I was the CMO of a portfolio company owned by Varsity Brands, the largest supplier of team sports gear in the U.S. I left that role in 2022 to work full-time on Low and Slow.

Starting a BBQ-inspired side hustle

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?

While I’ve spent much of my career in the corporate world, starting a business has always been on my bucket list. Back in 2019, while at dinner with a good friend, the topic of how to create the perfect BBQ chip came up. It led to the insight that all BBQ snacks revolve around BBQ sauce seasoning.

Having spent 22 years living in Dallas and eating at some of the best BBQ joints in the world, I can say unequivocally that BBQ sauce, while great, is the least important aspect of an authentic BBQ experience. It’s all about the wood, the smoke and lots of patience. The next day, I covered a tray of chips with a rub I use on ribs and threw it into my backyard smoker. The family devoured them. After some research to confirm that no other company had ever smoked snacks, Low and Slow was born.

Image Credit: Low and Slow

Figuring out how to smoke snacks at scale in the backyard

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money/investment did it take to launch?

Since I knew I wouldn’t be able to supply retailers like Walmart and Costco with product from my backyard smoker, figuring out how to create a novel manufacturing process to smoke chips at scale was my first step. I’m a marketer by trade, not an engineer. So I presented the concept to Mike Zbuchalski, a friend and former Frito-Lay colleague who spent 22 years at the company. Mike was the head of global research and development for PepsiCo Foods before retiring in 2016 and lived a few miles away.

I remember watching Mike open a Ziplock bag of smoked chips. After getting a whiff of a delicious BBQ smell, he told me he’d tried to nail aroma at Frito for 15 years and could never crack the code. With many patents to his name, Mike built his career on snack innovation. He was interested in helping me figure out how to create shelf-stable smoked snacks. He’s been my partner on this journey from day one. I couldn’t have done any of this without him.

Creating a snack brand that felt like a BBQ joint

It turns out this was a lot harder than I anticipated (maybe why no one has ever done it). After almost two years of trial and error in Mike’s backyard, and a lot of hickory wood, we finally cracked the code. Our immediate next step was to create killer branding, which was our biggest early expense (roughly $30,000). The goal was to create a brand that’s like a BBQ joint that smoked snacks instead of meat.

So instead of hiring ex-salty snack packaging design experts I got to know during my time at Frito, I hired a local hospitality-focused branding shop in Dallas called White Unicorn, which had a lot of experience with restaurant design. They absolutely crushed it, and their stellar design drove more early value for the company than I could have ever imagined.

With our branding done, we earned proof of concept by smoking small batches by hand, filling them in printed bags I bought online and then selling them at a local farmers market one weekend in Plano, Texas.

Image Credit: Low and Slow

Tapping into a valuable personal network — and AI

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business?

By far the most valuable free resource I leveraged when starting my business was my personal network. As I said last year while teaching a marketing class at Southern Methodist University, a lot of people think the best time to start a business is when you’re young and don’t have a family to worry about financially. I think the opposite.

My time in corporate America provided me with the training needed to get something like this off the ground, and more so, the people I met over my 20-plus-year career in brand marketing without question helped me accelerate the business. Once finding out what I was up to, former colleagues who had gone on to work at some of the world’s biggest retailers, packaging companies, agencies, etc. all wanted to know how t