The Slim Jim was first invented by Adolph Levis in 1929 in Philadelphia, although he and his partner subsequently hired a meatpacker to develop the product for production in the 1940s. He later sold the company in 1967 for about $20 million to General Mills, who moved the operations to Raleigh, North Carolina, and merged them into other meatpacking operations that it renamed Goodmark Foods. He sold Goodmark in 1982 to a group led by Ron Doggett.ConAgra bought Goodmark in 1998.