Steven Rinella is a busy man. As the founder and on-air face of MeatEater, a weekly reality-TV show, he oversees an ever-expanding empire of content and commerce focused on an outdoor lifestyle. But Rinella, the businessman, is not too busy to be Rinella, the outdoorsman. 

“My wife reminds me now and then, ‘you should be very careful who you complain to,’” Rinella tells Fast Company. “I have no real problems to report when it comes to outdoor time.”

Even during years when he’s spent as many nights on the road as home in Bozeman, Montana, with his family, Rinella still makes time each spring to go fishing in Alaska and, every October, for a youth-only deer hunting event in Montana, which “no opportunity in the world” would pull him away from.

But for the better part of two decades, Rinella has been seemingly everywhere doing everything. He’s written 15 books, created 12 seasons of the MeatEater TV show, and recorded scores of podcast episodes and videos, all of which has helped MeatEater, the media company, amass millions of loyal fans and more than $100 million in annual revenue.

The key is to hook people on the beauty of wild places. The 50-year-old has found that, with everything he does, he’s having two very different conversations simultaneously. 

In one, Rinella is sharing his love of the outdoors with like-minded people, wanting to help them fill out their knowledge base and deepen their relationship with the natural world. In the other conversation, Rinella is speaking with people who are uneasy in the outdoors, and he strives to show them that a “beautiful, rewarding lifestyle” awaits.

A content-to-commerce success

Newcomers to the Rinellaverse will find plenty to sink their teeth into, with MeatEater’s massive catalogue spanning videos, TV shows, podcasts, and books. Viewers, listeners, and readers often become fans and then customers, and MeatEater has beefed up its line of products to keep them sated. 

The company has found success in a content-to-commerce model by highlighting products the MeatEater team uses and loves. In 2019, MeatEater acquired First Lite, a popular line of technical hunting apparel. It has since expanded its products umbrella acquiring FHF Gear, Phelps Game Calls, and Dave Smith Decoys.

These brands are a natural extension of the MeatEater universe, Rinella says. He credits CEO Jason Bergsman with having the foresight to identify that content-to-commerce opportunity early on. 

Before taking the helm at MeatEater, Bergsman was a founding member of the Chernin Group, an investment firm that poured $50 million into MeatEater in its early days. He’s sat on the board since Rinella founded the company in 2018.

“[Bergsman] was very forceful—pleasantly forceful—in pushing us to think of the commerce business as a business in and of itself,” Rinella says. “We’ve been able to do that really successfully lately without, in any way, compromising the integrity of the products we put out, so that’s been really exciting.”

MeatEater leaders are optimistic about launching a couple more owned-and-operated stores in the coming year based on the early success of its flagship. There, shoppers can find company-owned brands heavily showcased, in addition to books and products from other brands it owns plus offerings from select partners. 

“It’s a pretty well-rounded shopping experience and really kind of gathers the whole portfolio of what MeatEater is all about in the store,” Rinella says. Bergsman adds that in the future, fans can expect to find more MeatEater products elsewhere, including at Scheels, a chain of sporting-goods stores with locations in 16 states.

History: “A real franchise play”

This year marks a more coordinated focus on American history across MeatEater’s various tentacles. “It’s a real franchise play,” says Bergsman.  

History has long been an interest of Rinella’s. In his 2006 debut book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, he chronicled a yearlong quest to live off the land re-creating recipes from Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 magnus opus, Le Guide Culinaire.

Now, other history-focused projects on the docket include two audiobooks, live events at three universities in Montana and Wyoming, an American history-focused version of the MeatEater trivia board game, and at least a couple new podcasts. One, focused on the history of the American West, set to launch this spring, reunites Rinella with someone influential to his career: Dan Flores, a professor emeritus of American History and a New York Times best-selling author. 

”How I approach my interest was really shaped by the time I spent studying under [Flores] at the University of Montana,” says Rinella, who completed an MFA in creative writing there after a stint as a professional trapper and fur trader. “It’s really cool for me.”

More kid-focused projects in the works

These types of full-circle moments seem to happen frequently. For instance, Rinella landed on the name MeatEater because, while working on the original TV show in its early days, he was spending his evenings reading books about animals to his then-toddler and noticed how often any variety of critters were described as meat-eaters.

“The word spoke to me,” he says. “The word brings to mind a certain survival sensibility, a certain tenacity, self-sufficiency.”