Conagra Brands broke the Guinness World Record for the longest meat snack by unspooling a Slim Jim that stretched more than 429 feet across a parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska, beating the old mark by 116 feet.
The supersized snack measured 429 feet and 5.4 inches, according to UPI. A Guinness World Records adjudicator was on site at Conagra's Omaha campus on September 9 and certified the result on the spot.
The snack started its public life coiled around a massive, rolling wire rack. Workers then unspooled it to its full length across a line of assembled tables in the parking lot, a spectacle that ran nearly one and a half football fields long.
Conagra's internal "Blaze Crew" team built the record-breaker. The team said it took pains to ensure the oversized stick used the same recipe and flavor as a standard Slim Jim, meaning the thing was, at least in theory, every bit as edible as the gas-station original.
That detail matters more than it sounds. Plenty of publicity stunts sacrifice substance for size. Conagra's crew insisted this one tasted like the real deal, not a 429-foot prop.
The new record eclipsed the previous longest meat snack by 116 feet, a margin wide enough to suggest nobody had come particularly close before Conagra decided to try.
The stunt is a lighter moment for a company that has navigated real operational pressure in recent years. During the omicron wave, Conagra reported that U.S. plant supplies would be constrained for at least a month because of worker absences, part of a broader grocery-supply crunch that pushed out-of-stock rates at American stores to roughly 15 percent, nearly double the normal range, AP News reported. The country was simultaneously short an estimated 80,000 truck drivers, a historic high.
Rolling out a 429-foot meat stick on the company campus in Omaha signals a manufacturer that has moved past crisis mode and into the kind of brand showmanship that only works when the factory floor is humming.
Guinness has not publicly identified who held the previous record or when it was set. The adjudicator's name was not released either. What is clear is that Conagra now owns the title outright, and by a comfortable margin.
In a country where grocery shelves were half-bare not long ago, a company betting resources on a world-record snack stick is the kind of American excess worth cheering for.
