Jack Link's Original Hickory Beef Jerky: Nutrition & Labelgrade C+ (65/100)

The short answer

Jack Link’s Premium Cuts Original Hickory Smokehouse Beef Jerky packs 12 g of protein into 80 calories per 1 oz (28 g) serving (USDA FDC 1852296) — about 43 g per 100 g, the densest protein we’ve graded, edging out even plain cooked chicken breast because drying concentrates the meat. It lands at C+ (65/100). The macro is elite; the base it rides on is not. Sodium hits 540 mg an ounce and the label runs through sugar, brown sugar, maltodextrin, MSG, and sodium nitrite. That gap between a perfect protein score and a curing-and-sweetening ingredient deck is the whole story of this jerky.

Why the C+

Read top to bottom, the table tells you exactly what kind of food this is: a near-perfect protein with one disqualifying number. Strip the sodium line out and this is an A-tier snack. You can’t strip it out — curing is salting — which is why the honest ceiling for traditional jerky sits around here, not higher. The saturated-fat A- is the quiet win most people miss: at 0.5 g per ounce, this is far leaner than the cheese or nuts you’d otherwise grab as a shelf-stable protein.

The sodium is the recipe, not a flaw to fix

It’s tempting to read 540 mg and assume sloppy formulation. It isn’t. Jerky exists because of salt: the cure pulls water out of the beef and shuts down the bacteria that would spoil it, which is the entire reason a strip of meat can sit in your glovebox for a year. Sodium nitrite on the ingredient line is doing that preservation job, not just seasoning.

The practical consequence is about portioning, not avoidance. One ounce — roughly 23% of a day’s sodium — is a reasonable hit for 12 g of protein. The trap is the bag. This 3.25 oz package is 3.3 servings, and jerky is engineered to be moreish; finish it in one sitting and you’ve eaten ~1,800 mg of sodium, near 78% of the daily limit, before dinner. Treat the bag as three snacks, not one, and the sodium math stays defensible.

”Original Hickory” vs the rest of the Jack Link’s wall

The flavor you pick changes the grade more than people expect. Original Hickory is the comparatively restrained choice: it leans on smoke rather than a sugar glaze, so it carries less added sugar than the teriyaki and sweet-and-hot variants sitting next to it. “Less,” though, is the operative word — 5 g an ounce of pure added sugar is still on the label, and both sugar and brown sugar appear high in the list.

So position it honestly. Among Jack Link’s flavors, Original Hickory is the cleaner sugar play. Against the wider jerky aisle, it is not the clean option — that title belongs to the zero-sugar and carnivore-style jerkies that cut the glaze entirely and often run lower on sodium too. If your reason for buying jerky is the protein-to-sugar ratio, Original Hickory beats its own teriyaki sibling but loses to a no-sugar-added competitor.

What “Premium Cuts” actually buys you

Premium Cuts is the whole-muscle tier: strips sliced from a solid cut, not the ground-and-reformed meat used in cheaper jerky and most meat sticks. That’s a real quality step, and it shows up at the top of the ingredient list as plain “beef” with a chew that reads like steak rather than a paste. It’s the best thing about the product and the reason the ingredient grade isn’t worse.

What Premium Cuts does not change is everything downstream of the beef. The same cure, the same two sugars, the same MSG and nitrite ride along regardless of which cut you start from. So you’re paying up for genuinely better meat wrapped in the standard jerky seasoning system — worth it for texture and the cleaner lead ingredient, but not a path around the sodium or the additives.

Who should buy it

Reach for it when shelf-stability and a steak-like chew matter and you’ll hold the line at an ounce or two: hiking, road trips, a desk drawer, the back half of a long flight. As a once-in-a-while, 12-g protein hit it’s a strong, honestly lean pick. Skip it as a daily protein staple — the sodium compounds fast — and skip it outright if you’re avoiding added sugar, MSG, or nitrites, where a zero-sugar jerky or plain chicken does the same job without the C+ baggage.

Ingredients

Beef, water, sugar, less than 2% salt, brown sugar, maltodextrin, flavorings, monosodium glutamate, spices, smoke flavor, sodium erythorbate, citric acid, sodium nitrite. (Verbatim from the USDA Branded Foods entry, FDC 1852296.)

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Scope: This page applies specifically to Jack Link's Premium Cuts Beef Jerky Original Hickory Smokehouse (3.25 oz (92 g)) · UPC 017082700100. Other sizes, flavors, or formulations may differ.