Forbes just featured BEEST Snacks in a story about food founders using AI to compete with much bigger players, and we cannot stop grinning about it.
On July 2, 2026, Forbes published "5 Ways Food Founders Are Using AI To Thrive" by Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan. BEEST shows up twice, at numbers four and five, for two very different reasons. You can read the full piece on Forbes.
A quick reminder of who is behind the counter here: BEEST is Lucas Prado and Nicole Ruiz, two industrial engineers and a couple who make Beef Jerky Chips, Pork Jerky Chips, and Charcuterie Trail Mix. No marketing department, no dev team, just the two of us and whatever tools we can get our hands on.
First, the battle of the bots.
For almost a year, Meta locked us out of our own Instagram and Facebook business accounts. Support tickets went nowhere for months. So we did the engineer thing. We set up an AI agent to reach out to Meta on a schedule and keep firing until a real human on the technical team picked up. 37 fires later, the BEEST bot won. We got a person, and the accounts came back.
Second, curated, not blasted.
At the Summer Fancy Food Show, the Specialty Food Association offered to connect us with more than 400 journalists over three days. That is a mountain of outreach for a two person team. We used an AI agent to help draft and send, but every email was curated, not blasted. The point was never volume, it was making each note worth reading. As we told Forbes, the approach got "great results, and you were one of them."
Here is the part we like most. None of this replaced the human work. The flavors, the blend, the recipes, the relationships, all of that is still us. AI just let two people cover the ground of a much bigger team, so we spend our time on the things only we can do.
That is the whole idea behind BEEST, a couple reinventing tried-and-true foods into high protein snacks, using every tool we can get our hands on to punch above our weight.
Thank you to Christine and to Forbes for seeing it.
Want the rest of the story? Visit our press room for fast facts and boilerplate, and meet the lineup: Charcuterie Trail Mix, Beef Jerky Chips, and Pork Jerky Chips.