In the crowded, highly competitive field of salty snack production, Muskego-based Jackson’s Food Company is proving sweet potato chips are king.

Over the past 13 years, Jackson’s has seen explosive demand for its sweet potato-based products, leading the company to complete three expansions in four years and enter new retail partnerships with nearly every major grocery chain.

In September, Jackson’s completed a $27 million expansion at its Muskego headquarters, located at S64 W15569 Commerce Center Parkway. The expansion added 80,000 square feet of production space for a total of 130,000 square feet.

Jackson’s recently leased 205,676 square feet of space in a 418,511-square-foot distribution center under construction at 10000 S. Ridgeview Drive in Oak Creek. The company’s current 30,000-square-foot warehouse space in Muskego will be relocated to Oak Creek, freeing up extra production room. The building, which is being developed by Frontline Commercial Real Estate, is expected to be complete in April. Stephen Provancher of Newmark brokered the deal for Jackson’s.

All of these moves are being made to support Jackson’s on its track to double revenue this year. That follows the past three consecutive years of the company tripling its revenue annually.

Jackson’s popularity continues to grow as consumers become more health conscious and aware of highly processed foods and ingredients like seed oils. Unlike other snack brands that use canola or sunflower oil, Jackson’s chips are made with avocado oil.

The use of lower-processed oils was never just a fad for Colorado residents Megan and Scott Reamer, co-founders of Jackson’s. The company was born from the desire to support their late son, Jackson, who suffered from an autoimmune disease for several years and required a restrictive, low-inflammation diet.

“They became the original crusaders against seed oil, which is the big trend today, and it was out of necessity,” said James Marino, president and chief executive officer at Jackson’s.

As part of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a firm stance against the use of seed oils, stating they are “poisoning Americans.”

His claims – and those of online wellness influencers – have sparked debate and heightened awareness of what companies are using to make food products. Kennedy’s claims that seed oils are “poisoning Americans” have not been proven by science.

Health experts have pushed back against Kennedy’s claims, with organizations including Harvard Medical School stating the use of “a few tablespoons” of seed oils while cooking can be a healthy option. Still, some consumers remain wary.

A recent study conducted by Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability found approximately 20% of Americans in 2025 are actively trying to avoid cooking seed oils, compared to 18% in 2024.

“The snack category today is in general decline,” said Marino. “Much of that is fueled by the rise of popularity of GLP-1 medications which have reduced snacking for many consumers, but Jackson’s has been a true outlier.”

Jackson’s currently has three main categories of products, its original sweet potato chips, kettle chips and veggie straws, all available for purchase at Costco, Amazon, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Kroger, CVS, 7-Eleven, Circle K, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Kwik Trip, Meijer, Pick ‘n Save, Walgreens, Woodman’s Markets and more.

Jackson’s founding

Jackson’s Food Company was founded as Jackson’s Honest in 2012 in the Reamers’ family kitchen in Crested Butte, Colorado. The business is named after Jackson Reamer, the oldest of Megan and Scott’s four children.

For most of his life, Jackson lived with a rare autoimmune disorder that was undiagnosed for several years. Between the ages of 2 and 5, he lost the ability to walk and talk. Jackson died in 2017 at the age of 16.

“(During Jackson’s struggle with his disorder) I was sort of a wreck. I tried to just go day by day,” said Megan Reamer. “Scott had a larger perspective on some of the options that we could try to implement ourselves without having any diagnosis.”

Before Jackson ever received a diagnosis, the Reamers assumed he was dealing with some sort of autoimmune disease. While examining everything Jackson put into his body, they kept circling back to the idea of food.

The Reamers reverse engineered his diet to see what foods exacerbated Jackson’s symptoms. They quickly found their hypothesis was correct. The kinds of foods Jackson ate had a “very large difference” on his daily comfort, Scott said.

“That’s a special type of torture for parents, to not really be able to find help or resources when a child is suffering,” he said. “The catalyst was us saying let’s find whatever agency we can in this process.”

The Reamers began feeding Jackson more root vegetables, including sweet potato, and ancestral fats like olive oil and avocado oil.

It took more than six months for the family to perfect their recipe for frying sweet potato chips over their kitchen stove.

“As many years went on, we started to think, why doesn’t somebody put this in the bag? Why doesn’t somebody make this easier for us to feed him these things?” said Megan.

A strong reception

In 2012, Jackson’s launched its first website and social media page. The Reamers would accept some orders, close the ordering link on the page, and make batches of chips in a small commercial kitchen.

When they completed a round of orders, they would reopen the ordering link. Within three months, the company had shipped products to all 50 states and 10 different countries.

“We made it a family project. All the kids were involved,” said Scott. “They will tell you to this day, ‘Oh man, the last thing I want to do is throw slices of sweet potatoes into a fryer.’”

A little more than a year after launching the company’s first website, Jackson’s earned its first retail placement at Colorado-based health food chain Natural Grocers.

Two months later, Jackson’s was in Whole Foods locations in the Rocky Mountain region. Megan said buyers were calling the family to put Jackson’s chips on their shelves.

“The people we were working with were like, this doesn’t happen. Normally people fight for space,” she said.

The brand’s national exposure continued to grow in 2017 when the Reamer family was contacted by scouts from ABC to gauge their interest in appearing on the hit TV
series “Shark Tank.”

While Megan was “kind of afraid” of the show and the possibility of going through a process that could feel negative, the Reamers eventually decided to audition. They pitched their product – and shared Jackson’s story – to the sharks in June 2017.

The entire process of flying to Los Angeles, arriving on set and filming the segment happened over the course of two days.

Once the Reamers returned to Colorado, they knew they had a “handshake deal” with shark Rohan Oza but they had no idea if their appearance would make the cut. Only half of the deals made on the show are ever shown to viewers, said Scott.

The Reamers’ segment officially aired during season nine of “Shark Tank.” Oza invested $1.25 million in Jackson’s for a 15% ownership stake. The company had also raised $3 million from friends and family at this time and was approaching $13 million in sales.

When he made his investment, Oza, who has worked with major brands including Vitaminwater and Vita Coco, said Jackson’s was “absolutely disrupting” the food and beverage space.

To this day, Jackson’s still sees a spike of new customers whenever ABC reruns its “Shark Tank” segment.

“I wouldn’t say it was meaningful as far as shifting things dramatically for our business, but (Oza’s) personality and his attachment to the brand was a big asset for us,” said Megan.

Jackson’s modern era

While Jackson’s was continuing to see momentum in its sales and new retail partnerships, Megan said the company never had all the right pieces in place at the same time.

“We had the interest, but we didn’t have the capital we needed,” she said. “We had some of the production, but we didn’t have the team.”

Everything began to fall into place for the Reamers once they connected with a private ownership group that would later purchase the business.

In July 2020, the group of private investors, based in the Milwaukee area, acquired the manufacturing assets of a shuttered potato chip plant in Chicago, along with Jackson’s business assets. The group then relocated the almost-new manufacturing equipment to a Muskego facility to serve as Jackson’s first production lines.

The Reamers declined to share who makes up the investment group.

Between July 2020 and December 2021, Jackson’s was in planning mode and essentially off the market while the company’s leadership team worked to get the Muskego headquarters up and running. At the same time, Jackson’s underwent a complete rebranding, changing its name from Jackson’s Honest to Jackson’s.

“Once you lose your shelf space, you’re completely starting over,” said Marino.

Once Jackson’s relocated to its current headquarters in 2020, the company entered an entirely new phase of its life.

Through Jackson’s private ownership group, the Reamers were introduced to Marino, who became interim CEO in 2022.

Marino is no stranger to the food industry. He and his wife, Jenny, previously owned Angelic Bakehouse, a wholesale bakery that operated in Cudahy until ceasing operations in 2024. The Marinos sold Angelic to Lancaster Corp. for $35 million in 2016.

Following his time at Angelic, Marino thought he would simply retire. However, boredom led him to check in with the investment group to inquire about how things were going with Jackson’s.

“At first I thought, wow, snacks. That’s got to be really competitive,” said Marino. “But I did some research. It was really hard to find anything similar to sweet potato chips, let alone sweet potato chips and premium oil.”

He began working for the company on a part-time basis in 2021, coming on board full time soon after.

Past expansions

From the start, the Muskego plant was built specifically to handle sweet potatoes, a process the Jackson’s team says is a labor of love. Working with non-genetically modified vegetables introduces several challenges to the manufacturing process.

Sweet potatoes have an irregular shape compared to white potatoes. Because of their more complex starch structure, they’re also more difficult to cook.

“That’s the hardest denominator to solve,” said Marino. “It requires a lot of special cutting technology and a lot of specialization in supply chain.”

Every day, between six and seven semi-trucks full of both sweet and white potatoes arrive at the Jackson’s plant.

Once the potatoes enter the building, they make their way through a washing station. After moving through the bath, the potatoes are moved through slicing equipment. That equipment can slice 200 pounds of potatoes in a matter of seconds.

From there, they are transported to the frying room. Jackson’s uses large-scale kettle fryers to cook all of its products in avocado oil. The sliced potatoes generally cook between six and seven minutes, while veggie straws only need to be fried for a few seconds.

Jackson’s fries all of its products specifically in avocado oil, which the company calls a “better-for-you fat.”

“All of our chips are cooked low and slow, maintaining the stability and integrity of the oil’s healthy fats,” according to the company’s website. “Avocado oil is well known to provide a wealth of health benefits, including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.”

Once cooked, the chips head to a different room to be seasoned with one of Jackson’s many flavors, whether that be traditional sea salt or a more modern flavor like spicy jalapeño or farmhouse ranch. The chips are then sent off to be packaged.

As Jackson’s has continued to grow, so has the amount of space needed at its headquarters. Company leaders said they were unsure this kind of growth would ever happen. Jackson’s wasn’t a profitable business up until two years ago.

“We were at zero revenue (in 2021), and the space seemed empty, and we barely had the demand to run for more than a couple hours at a time,” said Marino.

But soon enough, hours turned into days, and Jackson’s had enough demand for its first full-time shift. That first shift turned into a 24-hour operation, five days a week. Jackson’s would go on to triple its sales between 2021 and 2022.

The company’s first expansion, completed in late 2021, involved adding space to the west side of the building. At that time, Jackson’s occupied 50,000 square feet of space.

Phase two of expansion, which began in late 2023, involved the addition of two large kettle lines and two additional bagging lines. Jackson’s also added 10,000 square feet of production space, along with 27,000 square feet of warehouse space.

As part of phase three, two kettle lines and three new baggers are already operational with additional production lines slated to ramp up in the coming months. Ultimately, the space will house 10 large production lines and 13 seasoners and baggers.

The company’s third expansion also allowed leadership to invest in a separate production line dedicated to Jackson’s newest product: veggie straws. Officially launched in May, Jackson’s veggie straws marked the company’s third expansion to its core product categories. A lineup of white potato kettle chips was introduced in January.

“There’s a lot of places we can continue to go from here,” said Marino.

Jackson’s currently has 107 full-time employees and 25 job openings.

Future growth

In 2024, Jackson’s announced it had expanded into Walmart stores nationally. The company also made its debut in Canada by securing a partnership with supermarket chain Longo’s Markets. This was in addition to existing retail partnerships.

Jackon’s future growth will be supported through two main strategies: increasing the company’s number of retail partnerships along with the number of products available at a given location.

When brands first enter a store, they generally only place a handful of popular items on the shelves, Marino explained. As Jackson’s continues to prove its popularity, the company can add more products to store shelves while also increasing the number of stores it sells products in.

For example, Jackson’s has grown its Walmart partnership from 750 to 3,500 stores, while also adding more SKUs.

“We’re in more stores and increasing velocities,” said Marino. “Within these stores, our classic sweet potato chips are selling 50% more on a per-store basis than they did 12 months ago. Our classic kettle chips have grown faster than that.”

Velocity is a measure of the rate at which a specific SKU sells over a given period of time.

The company continues to search for alternative ways to get its products in front of consumers. A partnership with Alaska Airlines is set to be unveiled next year.

“In any measurable category, drugstores, food service, club, conventional, natural – any of them – we’re leading the category in terms of the growth,” said Marino.

Sustainability

Tying into the company’s all-natural mission, Jackson’s has developed a manufacturing process that has minimal impact on the environment. The ingredients and packaging the company uses, along with its approach to managing food waste, means the company sells a clean product, according to Marino.

Jackson’s sends its waste to a local farm to be biodigested. This creates natural gas that is then sent into gas lines throughout Wisconsin. Any physical byproduct that remains is used by farmers as fiber for cattle to sleep on. The packaging Jackson’s uses is recyclable, completing the low-impact manufacturing cycle.

This process is the result of months of work spearheaded by Luca Martino, vice president of operations at Jackson’s.

Martino, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a background in chemical engineering, spent his early career working in major hubs like San Francisco and New York. He learned about Jackson’s through the company’s private investment group.

Originally, Martino thought Jackson’s natural waste could be used as feed by pig farmers. However, with most large-scale pig farming operations being located overseas, it wasn’t a financially feasible option.

The next step that made sense was to check and see if cows could eat the sweet potato byproduct. A visit to a local dairy farmer also quickly killed this idea.

“He took one look at the nutrition label and said it’s not going to work. It’s too high in fat for cows,” said Martino.

By networking, Jackson’s got in touch with a large-scale farming operation in Fond du Lac. The company declined to share the name of the farm but did say it has operations in every state.

“A small percentage of the fuel, natural gas, in your home in Wisconsin could be coming from our farm that digests,” said Martino. “It is pretty cool.”

In the end, Jackson’s did manage to align all the necessary business pieces – capital, physical space, sales and a passionate team – at the perfect time.

“When you launch a small business, you dream of being at the bottom of the ninth with two outs and hitting a grand slam,” said Megan. “To have an experience that translates into this is pretty overwhelming and pretty unbelievable.”