Adolph Levis

Levis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a Jewish family.^[1] He was a high school dropout, having quit school to earn a living during the Great Depression.^[2]

Levis was a violinist, but his musical career was unsuccessful, as was an attempt as a tobacconist.^[3] Besides selling spices,^[1] he and his brother pickled meat and vegetable products such as pickles, cabbage, and pig's feet in his garage^[2] which they sold to Philadelphia taverns.^[4] In the 1940s, he and his brother-in-law/partner, Joseph Cherry, hired a meatpacker to develop a handheld dried meat stick.^[1] The snack was originally named Penn Rose^[4] (presumably after Pennsylvania and Rose, his wife^[1]). Although each meat stick was sold individually, a vendor stored the sticks as a bunch and immersed in a large jar of vinegar.^[1] Eventually the product was sold individually in a sealed cellophane wrapper. The Cherry-Levis Food Company was sold to General Mills in 1967 for $20 million,^[3] and Levis left the company about a year thereafter. The Slim Jim product line was sold to Goodmark Foods^[4] in 1982 and then to ConAgra in 1998.^[2] Sales in 2015 of the product line were $575 million.^[5][3]