Coleen and Joe Lachenman (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

        If he hadn't flirted with the woman at the butcher shop, Joe Lachenman might not have taken the daring leap into the beef jerky business.

        It was a hot August afternoon in 1988 when Mr. Lachenman waited on the petite, brown-haired woman at his store in Erlanger. She asked for boneless chicken breasts, but he was fresh out. Then he popped a truly original come-on line:

        “You want me to show you how to take the bones out yourself?”

        Colleen Gregory wasn't interested in learning how to use a boning knife, but she was amused enough by the charming meat-cutter to say yes when he asked her out.

        Two years later, they married — on the same day Mr. Lachenman sold his two meat stores in Northern Kentucky. With the encouragement of his new wife, Mr. Lachenman decided to get out of retail to make and sell jerky at his company, Wild Joe's.

        In the decade since, beef jerky — the salty, leathery strips that pioneers packed cross-country and cowboys stuffed into their jeans — has gone mainstream to become the fastest-growing snack food. Formerly favored by hunters and truck drivers, soccer moms, dot-com geeks and others now gnaw jerky as a high-protein, low-carb alternative to chips and pretzels.

TO ORDER JERKY

Go to www.wildjoesworld.com or call (800) 577-5910.

        Wild Joe's has capitalized on the craze, distributing jerky to UDF and Thriftway stores and to mail-order customers in nine states, Canada and Europe. Mr. Lachenman will turn 31 tons of beef into jerky this year — up from a little more than a ton his first year of production.

        Business is so good, Ms. Lachenman quit her job five years ago as an emergency room nurse to market and sell Wild Joe's jerky.

        “He makes the jerky, I do everything else,” says Ms. Lachenman, who has “Wild Colleen” printed on her business cards.

        Everyone is “wild” about jerky in the Lachenman family, who live in Walton, including the couple's 9-year-old daughter “Wild” Savannah Jo. She teethed on jerky as an infant.

        When it comes to personality, though, Mr. Lachenman is anything but wild. Sometimes, they call him “mild” Joe.

Trims it himself
        Monday morning, Mr. Lachenman stands on a short stack of wooden pallets at one end of the bright, bone-chilling room at his Camp Washington plant. With a slow, sure rhythm, he moves partially frozen hunks of raw-red beef round across the whirring blade of an electric slicer.

        “Quarter of an inch thick,” he says, holding up a thin slice. “That's the perfect width.

        In less than six hours, he will cut about 1,100 pounds of beef. Work is going more slowly on this morning, though, because he has to trim out tiny veins of white fat.

        Fat would lend flavor to the jerky, he says, but it would make the beef strips look and feel greasy.

        “People don't buy jerky for the fat,” he says. “They want it lean.”

        With his reddish-gray scruffy beard and hair, Mr. Lachenman resembles the cartoon “Wild Joe” character on the jerky package. Short and wiry, he wears plastic sanitary gloves over insulated gloves to keep his hands warm. His left-hand is gnarled and bent from rheumatoid arthritis, a disease he has endured for more than 20 years.

        “Doesn't really hurt,” he says. “But doing this kind of work doesn't help either.”

        His wife says he could probably hire someone else to slice the beef to his specifications.

        “Joe doesn't trust anybody else to do that,” she says. “He's kind of picky.”

        He grew up in North College Hill and helped his brother, John, cut meat at a small grocery in Edgewood from 1974-1981. The brothers then opened two stores called J & J Quality Meats in Erlanger and Independence.

        “My dream was to open a chain of meat stores,” Mr. Lachenman says. “I gave up on that because of the hours. When I owned the stores, I was working 100 or more hours a week.”

        In 1987 — the year before the momentous flirtation — his meat customers convinced him to try making jerky. He did, using a simple marinade, seasonings and a small dehydrator, and jerky soon became so popular there was a backlog of orders.

        “I started thinking then about going into the jerky business,” he says.

Tricky part is humidity
        Except for the quantity, his method for making the jerky has changed little. After he slices the beef, it goes into a big metal barrel, where it's jostled around for two hours in a dark, murky marinade that Mr. Lachenman will only describe as soy sauce and “secret seasonings.”

        The beef sits in the marinade overnight and the next day, Mr. Lachenman and his handful of employees carefully lay the strips on wire racks. They shake on the seasonings (Mr. Lachenman makes “All-Natural,” “Cajun,” “Hot” and “Lemon Pepper” flavors), and roll the beef into a 4-ton smoker. The beef slowly cooks at 200 degrees for six hours, until it turns dry and crispy.

        The tricky part to cooking the jerky is taking the outdoor humidity into account. If it's raining or very humid, Mr. Lachenman may have to cook the beef a little longer. When he first talked to jerky companies out west, they told him he was crazy to try to make jerky in Ohio's heavy humidity.

        “It took me about six months after we moved in here to figure out how to cook it right,” he says.

        For the first seven years, the Lachenmans leased space at another plant to make their jerky. They bought the former sausage plant in Camp Washington in 1997.

        After the beef is cooked, Mr. Lachenman lets the strips rest overnight to cool and absorb a little moisture from the air. The next day, his helpers weigh and bag the jerky on a scrubbed stainless steel table. Mr. Lachenman insists on heat-sealing the plastic bags himself.

        No one else can do it right.

"A natural sales person'

        Ms. Lachenman had faith from the beginning that the jerky venture would work.

        “The day we got married, Joe sold his stores and was unemployed,” she says. “I didn't marry him for his money, that's for sure. But it was his dream, and I didn't want him to turn 80 and wonder: "If only I had tried the jerky business.'”

        While working as a nurse at St. Elizabeth South in Edgewood, she helped out as much as she could — including hooking colleagues at the hospital on her husband's jerky.

        In 1995, she went to a Reds game carrying a purse packed with jerky. She started handing it out, and people went nuts over it.

        “I called Joe from the game and told him he was crazy if he didn't let me sell his jerky,” she says.

        He had little choice then, and now he doesn't regret it.

        “That was the best thing that ever happened,” Mr. Lachenman says. “Colleen is a natural sales person.”

        At first, many of the store managers Ms. Lachenman approached on her sales route didn't want to hear about Wild Joe's jerky. They already had plenty of jerky. But Ms. Lachenman was determined to convince them her product was better. She thrives on the challenge.

        There were lows, like the time a national snack food brand pushed them out of a Kentucky convenience store chain. But bad times were balanced by the good.

        “I remember this man came up to me when I was making a delivery in a store,” she says. “He was on a low-fat diet and couldn't believe how good our jerky was. He had tears in his eyes.”

        How do they make jerky so good it makes people cry?

        “It's better because it's all natural,” Mr. Lachenman says. “We don't use any preservatives.”

        Because he doesn't use preservatives, Mr. Lachenman has to cook his jerky longer and drier than the national brands — shrinking the beef and his profit margin.

        “But I think that's what keeps us in business,” he says. “We're better than the big guys.”

        “This is not a fad,” adds his wife. “Jerky is no longer just a jock and hunter thing. Kids eat jerky. Most of our Web site customers are women.”

        The Lachenmans are preparing for a flurry of orders this spring, when a TV Food Network story on Wild Joe's is scheduled to air. Mr. Lachenman says he can quadruple his jerky production — up to two tons a week — without having to expand his plant.

        And he and his partner will continue to work together just fine, he predicts.

        “As long as Colleen is in charge, we get along, ” he says.
       

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